


Preiddeu Annwn

by Roseus



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, Arthur Pendragon Returns (Merlin), BUT NOT THE WAY YOU WOULD USUALLY THINK, Dark, Episode: s05e13 The Diamond of the Day, Fae & Fairies, Fix-It, M/M, Major Character Devastation, Major Character Undeath, Rated For Violence, Whump, by way of Break-It, choo choo all aboard the pain train, welcome to the harmacy how may i help you
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:48:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 34,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28560078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roseus/pseuds/Roseus
Summary: King Arthur rests eternally beyond the gates of Avalon, awaiting Albion’s time of greatest need.Okay.Alright.Merlin is going to storm Avalon.
Relationships: Merlin/Arthur Pendragon (Merlin)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 35





	1. Canto i: Rota Fortunae

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If my other merlin fic was the fuck canon, everyone is happy forever response to the horror-tragedy we know as the bbc's the adventures of merlin (2008-2012), this is going to be the equal and opposite side of that coin. I'm drawing on a number of stories from antiquity, primarily Preiddeu Annwn (the raid of avalon) from the book of Taliesin.  
> It also has a soundtrack! its linked in the first words of the text. Each chapter comes with six instrumental songs and one lyric song.  
> Canto i songs-  
> The Phone Call - Alexandre Desplat  
> I Understood Something – Dario Marianelli  
> Sonmi’s Discovery – Tom Tykwer  
> Libera Me Responsorium – Aurora Surgit  
> The White Goddess – Sharm  
> Cruel Mistress – Clint Mansell  
> Free – Tune-Yards  
> Trigger warning for Merlin's no good very bad thought processes, which can read as suicidal ideation at times.

[Still early](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0EQhKT84C0ggE5lEwwA0VD?si=7BFHDTnpTYyOPi4cGQBjsQ) upon the journey of his life, Merlin found himself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.1

If anyone had come upon him they would have thought him a wild man. His eyes were bruised red into the ash-pale of his face, looking forward but seeing little. Scratches clawed up his arms and legs where he was insensate to the whipping of thorns and vines as he passed, stooping under boughs of yew, trudging ruts into winter mud. All around him, the overflowing air or grief mixed unhappily with the simmering current of overflowing magic.

Magic boiled under the warlock’s skin, spilling out from him like the curling of warm water into cool, or bilious smoke into air. The earth, in its wisdom, quickly took in and converted the storm-tide of wild magic into green and tender growth, so that shoots and vines heeled to Merlin like a dog looking for scraps. Great bindweed laced up his limbs, tearing away and regrowing with every step he took. The trumpet-shaped blossoms always seemed to face away from his eyes. Tall stalks of anemone rose up behind him and drew a perfect map of where he had been in bursts of red and violet. Crowns of purple thistle clung to his clothes as if it were trying to hold him back, and delicate meadow-saffron crushed under his boots. And wherever his shadow fell clusters of death-white yarrow sprung up like the clustered shields of a phalanx of soldiers, choking out the native growth there in their shade.2

He did not notice. Merlin was arrested by the contemplation of loss. In the closed chambers of his mind the weight of Arthur’s body was still heavy in his hands, and the same questions repeated until they lost meaning, and still then repeated until they came back in tongues he had never heard spoken.

_Ergo ne sic potuit sors importuna nocere_

_Vt michi surriperet tantos tales que sodales_

_Quos modo tot reges- tot regna remota timebant_

_O dubios hominum casus mortem que propinquam:_

_Que penes est illos semper- stimulo que latenti:_

_Percutit- et miseram pellit de corpore vitam…_ 3

Over the last eight years, every loved one he had lost had taken with them a small scrap of his own soul. Will had taken his carelessness, his sacrifice binding Merlin to his true purpose with no room for error. Freya had taken his optimism, that there was some way to escape his burdens and live both understanding and understood. Lancelot had taken his trust, leaving him without the one _friend_ (not caretaker, not enemy) who had shared the weight of his truth. But laying Arthur’s arms hand over hand in the old wood boat had stripped him down to the helpless child who hid in the back shed and cried because water followed his touch and he couldn’t make it stop. When the boat had shrunk to a speck on the mirror surface of the lake of Avalon, it seemed there was very little of Merlin left at all.

“Take heart,” Kilgharrah had told him. Merlin had heard the instruction underlying it. Wait. Don’t ask why, because the answer will be that this is just the true nature of life. Gird your patience and wait until duty runs out, because you have not yet paid your way.

Reality escaped the warlock. Far from any road and without any map, he was led only by the compass of his own will, driving deeper into the untamed wood in demand of clarity. The passage of time was immaterial and slipped away uselessly. It might have been hours or days before he reached the cavemouth, and he could not have said. But against all natural odds he did arrive at that yew grove that the Disir made their home, recognizing it by the holy symbols even before the cavern itself came into sight. Merlin stepped across the line of the shadow of the hollow mouth, and not even the thistle would follow behind him.

The cave was broad and uneven. The few stalagmites and stalactites were older than the current tenants but perhaps not older than their traditions. A careworn path had been smoothed into the stone by the passing footsteps of generations after generations of women raised from birth to see and pass judgement in the name of the Triple Goddess. Countless heads had craned over the divining pool at its center, and countless hands had held the carved hazel staffs. Theirs was a dying practice, and a practice that under modern times risked death. In spite of this three figures still rose above the pool like stone columns that had forgotten the building they once supported.

Merlin shambled down into the basin, limbs moving in a way that continued locomotion but did not altogether suggest any cognizant cooperation of the moving parts. The body was forgetting itself. Once more the Disir looked upon him with an air of calculated interest, barely raising their stone-gray heads to face him. Seeing them again, Merlin was struck fresh with a wave of all-consuming despair.

What a strange thing, to look into the eyes that had seen the light of his world and found it wanting. In this life one does sometimes meet the impersonal arbiters of our fate, and there’s little that makes a body feel so utterly infantile as meeting the hand that crucially shapes one’s life without caring in the slightest about the circumstance. So it was now.

He looked at them and they examined him in turn. He tried to speak and found his voice hoarse from weeping and disuse. Nonetheless, he soon found the right language.

“You have misjudged.”

The Disir were not unaccustomed to hearing such a statement.

“That is something we are not capable of, Emrys,” Niede replied. The three remained unmoved.

Merlin pressed on, incapable of doing anything else. “Arthur made his decision because of my counsel. The judgement you pass should be on my head alone.”

Were it not so dark, the eye might have detected the slightest tightening in each of the three brows. “Emrys,” Atorloppe replied. The word carried a kind of poor man’s imitation of sympathy, from one who was not accustomed to displaying it. “This _is_ your judgement. Arthur’s death is _your_ punishment.”

The lash of guilt fell on him with a vengeance. Merlin had at many points in his life been told that the worst disasters were his fault, if nothing else by the dogging of his own conscience. His habitual reaction was to submit and let the dread of it roll over him like thunder, but at this moment it was too much. To be blamed for Arthur’s death was such a perfect star of agony that the pain of the little cuts from thorns and vines and the aching of his sleepless head dimmed to nothingness, until he was perfectly numb.

The wind whistled across the mouth of the cavern. The rushing of Yew needles against each other filled the air with whispering. None of the assembled sorcerers seemed to notice, but a charge seemed to be building in the air, raising the fine hairs on the leaves of plants.

“Punishment.” Merlin repeated the word like it was foreign. “I need you to understand. Please try and understand, for a moment. The list of things I would do to keep Arthur Pendragon safe is unending, and the list of things I have done is not much shorter. I have given everything I have to give in service of your goddess’ thrice-damned prophecy—I have given everything that I am. Everything that was expected of me I became, and if you really look at me now you’ll find I’m just the shape of the negative space of his life. If I met my own mother today I don’t know if she would recognize me. When I look at myself I rarely know what blood is my own, how could she? And in all of this- in all of this- I haven’t done enough. Where have I failed? What am I lacking? I _beg_ you to tell me what I’ve done wrong.”

“You ask, but you know,” Befelen continued. “You put the life of one man above the greater good.”

Merlin laughed, terrible and hollow. “Arthur _is_ the greater good!” he shouted. “You _wanted_ me to care for him! And now you would condemn me for caring too much?”

“You forsook your own kin. You lied, stole, and murdered,” Atorloppe replied, immovable as stone.

“I did what destiny required of me, even when it was terrible.”

“You chose to serve destiny above humanity, and destiny is notoriously cruel. The sentence is balanced. You betray your kin, and so they betray you. You love fate idolatrously, so it shall take you as an idol. You wish more than anything to die for your king—”

Merlin’s eyes widened with a dawning, awful realization of what was about to be told to him.

“No.”

“—so you may never die.”

“ _No_!”

The word rang like a physical whipcrack through the air, lifting dust from rocks and resonating deep into the Disir’s bones. Still, they stood as tall as oaks. The way they were raised, they had never been children and rarely been people—they were only myths. The day they flinched would be the day they ceased to have any meaning, like the last spoken word of a language going extinct.

Merlin reeled. To him, that Arthur was dead and he was alive still seemed some fatal error in the circuits of the stars. He had a thousand times or more pictured his own death in service of Arthur’s life. He had pictured it completely alone and by Arthur’s side, in glory and undiscovered for weeks on end, loud as the horns of angels and quiet as the habitual execution of a dormouse. He knew how it would feel if he was poisoned, stabbed, lacerated, beaten, shot through, even drowned. Sacrifice was the only word he had for his love. He had never presumed he might outlive Arthur, and now that his king had so foolishly gone on ahead of him, an eventual mortal end was the only corridor back to him. This is what was being taken from Merlin.

Merlin recalled Kilgharrah’s words all those years ago, calling him and Arthur two sides of the same coin. They were counterbalances, equal and opposite and universally, fundamentally always at each other’s side. To separate them—one in life and the other in death—seemed such a profound cruelty that Merlin wondered if there was ever anyone born who was more wicked than him, if this was his justice.

Take heart, spoken like wait. He heard Niede speak from what felt like miles away.

“Arthur’s soul rests beyond the gates of Avalon, awaiting Albion’s time of greatest need. Your loyalty to him binds you more thoroughly than any chain. This is the prison of your own design.”

And Merlin thought, _I_ am _wicked_. Rotted through with profane love that turned him cruel and dangerous, leaving nothing but the bones. Gaius had seen it when he had asked what had become of the young boy Merlin used to be, and Merlin had had no language for what kind of alchemy of the spirit had been done to him aside from the admission that the world had made him old. He _had_ lied, and he _had_ stolen, and he _had_ murdered, so that Arthur would never even have to consider any subject that might disturb the contentment of his soul.

“You will wait for him, be it a year, a century, or a millennium. By your own nature you cannot do anything else,” Befelen added.

And whatever gentleness had held together the string of bad mistakes, what moments of laughter and hands on arms and what passing moments of unspoken acknowledgement that had tempered him, whatever tenderness belies and betrays the human heart—it had died on the shores of the lake of Avalon.

From the deepest shadowed crevices of the cave, sprouts of yarrow began to push through layers of rock, savagely eroding the ancient walls with curling green leaves. Thistle columbine stabbed upwards amongst the stalagmites, unfolding prickly blooms that spat down in the howling wind. Clusters of purple columbine with their bent necks opened their five-pointed sepals like the lips of a beast curling back from its teeth. These plants burst upwards and outwards so quickly that they tumbled over each other in their haste, braiding and tangling together. Last of all, the fingers of hearty fern-like fronds grasped and crawled over the purple and white, choking the necks of columbine, piercing the phalanx of yarrow, wrapping undaunted around spines of thistle. This last seed sprung into bloom, and the hollow was filled wall to wall with waves of golden tansy.

“Regretably,” Merlin began, voice featureless and hollow. “You’ve misjudged.”

Somewhere far away, lightning snapped against an Alder tree and split it open down to the roots. The wind had hurried low hanging clouds over the sky, and the cave passed briefly into a pitch darkness lanced through with the light of two star-bright eyes, yellow as twin tansy blooms. There came a sharp, threefold crack, and when the darkness had passed the unconscious bodies of the Disir had collapsed onto the stone floor worn smooth by their ancestors. Merlin breathed in, and out. His breath only tremored slightly at what he had done. It was a kindness compared to the slaughter he had wrought at Camlann. He crossed the distance between them and looked into their uncovered faces, old and hard and still.

“Tell your goddess I’m coming,” he said.

Stooping, he took up Niede’s staff. He turned away and put one unsteady foot in front of the other until he felt the sting of grey overcast light on his eyes. At a last thought he reached out and extinguished the life from every green thing yet living in the crag, so the stems became brittle and yellow in a blink. Even as he did it the seeds of purple columbine were germinating again, peeling open their shells and preparing to try the world one more time.

Merlin suspected that he would pass the rest of his life with constant awareness of what direction Avalon lay in. He faced it now and found that direction was north-east. Striking out on that heading, he let the pull of the distant lake draw him in like the tide.

* * *

A world away, a king opened his eyes to a cinnabar-painted ceiling.

Arthur was at first too puzzled by the dazzling color to think much about anything, but gradually he became aware of the lack of stabbing pain through his torso, and of the lightness of his limbs, and came to the conclusion that he was dead. He was correct in this assumption.

The king lay face-up on a stone altar, much the same as his own father had been laid out not all that many years before. His adornment was as it was the moment Merlin had sent his body into the lake, with his red cape still clasped over his breast and the links of mail over his abdomen cleanly severed. Strangely, he found himself missing his dagger, but the set was otherwise complete. The polished metal glimmered in wavering patterns of light from an abundance of wax candles which had been left burning for many hours in recessed arches in the walls, and had melted into almost unrecognizable mounds of drippings. Each wall was the same violent red, cast in soft shadows of flickering light.

Slowly, still testing his strength, Arthur sat up. No pain came. He stared at the single heavy oak door on the leftmost wall, and felt unaccountably like he had stepped out of his days as an uncrowned prince. Suddenly it seemed to him that no time had passed at all. A scant five years after his coronation, he had fallen at the hand of his own sworn brother.

In his rule, Arthur had accomplished much. While abstaining from the conquering impulse that had made monsters of stronger men, he had still united the kingdoms of their land under a common cause if not a common banner. He had created codes of fairness and honor that would long outlive him. He had entered Guinevere in the line of succession, which would likely do more for Camelot than the rest put together. However, some part of him had hoped against hope that he would live to be a peacetime king. Not that he would know what to do with peace. But he also knew this was an honorable death, and as much as his legacy could have hoped for.

If he felt any regret, it was more personal than that. In his last two days alive, Arthur had finally experienced a brief clarity on the nature and form of his life. War, and Magic, and Duty, and _Merlin_ had all fallen into focus like a brief conjunction of planets that only comes a handful of times in a generation. He had only accepted it for a handful of hours, for which he gained the final privilege of dying in the arms of someone who loved him beyond reason.

The thought of it pierces through his chest like Mordred’s blade all over again. _That_ was where he found the injustice—that he had finally fathomed Merlin out, finally seen the measure of the depths of his devotion and the weight of his decisions, and all Arthur had to give in return was hours. After eight years of friendship Arthur had finally met Merlin for the first time, and in the span of two days had had come to know and accept completely the familiar stranger who was frightful and gentle and _magical_ , in the inevitable conclusion of a trajectory that arced from a summer day years ago in the market square to the cool shore of Avalon. But the moment between them that seemed to finally sigh _at last_ could only be that—a moment—before retreating before the veil of death forever.

The king was startled out of such private thoughts by a faint but rising strain of music which was so plaintive and longing that it seemed to have been plucked from the strings of his own heart. The voice was distant and Arthur could not deduce which direction it was coming from. Standing, he pressed a hand to the oak door and pushed it open, peering out beyond.

He was greeted by his own reflection, and stars. Arthur was quite disoriented for a second as it appeared to him as if he had simply stepped out into the night sky. In reality it was an enormous corridor-wall of glass so clear and free of defect that little gave it away other than the play of reflection of light. It may as well have been crystal. The opposing wall and the floor resembled foreign black marble, though the stone hadn’t come from _any_ mortal nation.

Gaining his bearings, Arthur listened again for the singing. Deciding more on impulse than conviction, he turned left and followed the corridor further into the darkness. The voice never seemed to grow any closer, but at length another broad oak door appeared out of the black. He hesitated, for it was the first distinguishing feature he’d come across, and he sorely disliked wandering blindly when he didn’t have so much as a sword. Pursue the music, or investigate the door? He was saved the decision when the music quieted and then stopped.

He pushed open the door, which was just as heavy as the last. Despite its resistance it opened with barely a whisper. Arthur was again immediately struck by the wealth of color. This room looked as if it has been painted from floor to ceiling with pure lazurium4, but he quickly discounted this thought on account of the incalculable cost. Had he taken into consideration the value of cinnabar and black marble, he might have thought differently. He also registered the intricacy of the long banquet table, which was carved with strange clawed feet and climbing vines.

These trifling thoughts stopped dead as he laid eyes on the solitary figure in the room. Ygraine stood before a grey stone cauldron which was the plainest fixture in the room by far, with her hair twisted up on her head strung with pearls and sparkling thread, matched in its white-gold color by her long, cascading gown that fanned out behind her feet like a puddle of moonlight.

Arthur stared, eyes hot and stinging. Ygraine looked surprised for only a moment before a wide and sentimental smile dawned on her face. She went to him immediately and closed him in her arms, and it was all he could do to stand still and hide his tears.

She rested a hand on the back of his head. “Oh, my son. You must be so tired.”

Arthur choked a laugh. “Exhausted.” He hadn’t noticed until she said it, but it was true. Somehow he felt both fresher than he had in years and so utterly weary that it felt like the earth was pulling him down by the ankles. He gritted his teeth. “This can’t be real. It can’t be. I’ve barely done anything.”

Ygraine hugged him tighter and then released him, looking him in the eye. He wished badly that he wasn’t in armor, which was limiting to an embrace and provided nothing to wipe his tears. The plates of steel suddenly felt pompous and outsized, like he was a child playing pretend.

“You’ve done more than most men could even dream of, and your story will remain on humanity’s tongue for longer than you can believe. It is enough. My Arthur, you’ve done enough,” she said, laying a hand on his cheek.

Arthur often had a harder time with words when upset. He nodded dumbly, and the former queen squeezed his hands and led him to the end of the banquet table, where she sat at the head. He took the seat to her right, not caring if it seemed presumptuous, and felt the weight of years press him into the chair. The two looked at each other with something near disbelief. Arthur had only met Ygraine for a few brief moments years ago and still believed that vision to have been a deception, and still somehow expected her to disappear with the changing of the light or the passing of the hour. In return her look seemed to understand everything that he was or had been—not passing judgement but only seeking to understand.

Arthur spoke first. “What is this place?”

“Rest,” Ygraine replied, “A good rest after a lifetime of toil.”

Arthur nodded again, digesting this.

“What troubles you?” Ygraine asked gently. “Is it your kingdom?”

Arthur chuckled weakly. “No. Camelot couldn’t be in better hands.”

She frowned. “There is something you worry for yet. I can see it in you.”

Arthur supposed he had wanted all his life to be able to confide in this one person, and couldn’t deny the chance even if his instinct was still to deny all allegations of emotion. He was silent for a long moment as he wrestled with his impulse to stay quiet.

“…There is one man.”

Ygraine’s eyes widened fractionally. “All your worry for one man?”

Arthur grinned in spite of himself. “He needs all of it, most days. My friend—my best friend. He gets into trouble like it’s a competition. It feels imprudent to leave him alone.”

Ygraine examined him with her clear, placid eyes. “And what’s this man’s name?”

Arthur felt an autumn and a winter pass through his heart before he even said the word. “Merlin. His name is Merlin.”

Ygraine’s face darkened like a cloud passing over the moon. Her brow creased in a way that Arthur recognized from his own face, and her mouth drew thin. “Oh, Arthur. That is no man.”

Arthur stared.

“Do not mistake me,” Ygraine rushed, “I mean no offense. Only, the warlock you know as Merlin can hardly be called a human being.”

“You aren’t making any sense,” Arthur rasped.

She smiled sadly. “There was a time he was human, but that part of him was broken on the wheel of fate long ago. In the pursuit of destiny, he became something more than a god and less than an animal. I wish I was just being fanciful, but as he is now he cannot even die. Magic-kind knows him as Emrys, the legendary sorcerer who cuts down enemies as easily as a farmer cuts down grain, and they fear and revere him by turns. He is the most dangerous creature alive, if you could call him living.”

Arthur had grown more and more stone-faced as she spoke. He shook his head. “I don’t believe that.” For how could he? As simple as that. Even if Merlin was deceptive, Arthur thought of him as so antithetical to cruelty that the idea became ridiculous. Arthur could not deny he was powerful, this was still the same man who stepped loud to warn rabbits of the encroaching hunt.

Ygraine withdrew a coarsely woven sachet from the sleeve of her gown, untying the twine that clasped it shut and upending five hazelnuts into her palm. They clicked together as she closed her fingers around them and stood, returning to the cauldron she had been standing at when Arthur entered. “Come. It would be better if you could see for yourself.”

Arthur’s conscience protested weakly that whatever she would show him, he should refuse on principle of faith in Merlin’s character. But it was a hopeless cause when weighed against his curiosity. Too many of his questions remained unanswered. He was wary from a lifetime of betrayal, and his habits had been worn into his skin alongside every scar. He came to her side and saw that the inside of the plain stone cauldron was lined to the lip with mother-of-pearl. The basin was filled with pale wine, cloudy iridescence giving the effect of molten moonstone.

Arthur was about to ask what he was supposed to be seeing when Ygraine raised her closed fist over it and released the hazelnuts into the wine. They plunked beneath the surface and immediately began to fizz, spinning in cockeyed loops under the power of their own dissolving bodies. Bubbles swam to the surface and released sweet gasses, the likes of which the earth was like to sigh at such sites of prophecy as the chasm of Delphi, or was produced from the burning of mystic herbs such as oleander.5 Breathing them, the king was overtaken by a pleasant dizziness that consumed the senses. In the space of a moment the blue room grew distant and unclear to him. The weight of his body left him, and he knew nothing but dreams.

* * *

Notes

1. This line parallels the opening of The Divine Comedy: “Midway upon the journey of our life/ I found myself within a forest dark,/ For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

2.All flower language is taken from hanakotoba, because it’s objectively the best flower language. Today’s stars are great bindweed (extinguished hopes), anemone (fleeting love, abandonment), thistle (independence, revenge, severity), meadow saffron (my best days are past), yarrow (war, achilles), purple columbine (determined to triumph), and tansy (declaration of war).

3. The Latin text is from Vita Merlini and should translate as “Could injurious fate be so harmful as to take from me so many and such great companions, whom recently so many kings and so many remote kingdoms feared? O dubious lot of mankind! O death ever near, which has them always in its power, and strikes its hidden goad and drives out the wretched life from the body!”

4. Colors: Cinnabar pigment is the same thing as vermillion, but that name didn’t exist yet and I don’t know what one did. Lazurium (Λαζουρίου) is about the closest we have to a confirmed name for lapis lazuli during the sixth century (according to “Lapis lazuli, lazurite, ultramarine ‘blue’, and the colour term ‘azure’ up to the 13th century”).

5. The image of submerged hazelnuts producing bubbles of inspiration is from the general legends around the hazels of wisdom over the seven chief rivers of Ireland. The gasses of the chasm of Delphi and the burning of oleander both refer to modern theories about the causes of the visions of the Pythia, the oracle of Apollo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Arthur: (twirling phone cord) so there's this human shaped natural disaster,  
> lyric highlight from "Free"- "Crying, I keep crying for my truth/ My tears the only route/ But I'm alive and seething/And I'm coming back for you"


	2. Canto ii: Vita Merlini

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canto ii soundtrack:  
> Griet’s Theme (Reprise) – Alexandre Desplat  
> Le Carnaval des animaux: Aquarium – Camille Saint-Saens  
> 海との別れ – Joe Hisaishi  
> To Know, Water – Austin Wintory  
> 実存主義者 – Yuji Yoshino  
> Hologram for the King (End Title) – Johnny Klimek  
> Sax Rohmer #1 – The Mountain Goats  
> In which the author spends far too much time discussing fish.

The wind was in the East. This was inconvenient to Merlin, so he changed it. When he sighted Avalon over the last cresting hill before him, he had thought it over and come to the conclusion that it ought to be South-by-Southwest, and so it was.

By the time he arrived at the lakeshore the sun was fast retreating behind the horizon. Merlin had not slept or eaten since Arthur had died, but it mattered little to him. His mind was still sharp as it considered the many disparate aspects of the magical task before him. Opening the gates of Avalon was far beyond any theory he had read in books.

Merlin was in possession of a few known quantities, which in regards to Avalon was more than even the most learned sorcerer could say for themself. Years ago he had witnessed the Sidhe Sophia and Aulfric attempt to open the gates, and the memory was preserved in its freshness by the tint of adrenaline and fear that had saturated his experience of it. The ritual they had used required the soul of a prince and the substrate of the waters of the lake itself. It followed from the need of a soul of a prince that the spell used a great amount of spirit magic, to an extreme that even two mortal Sidhe couldn’t produce it under their own power. It was unclear whether the significance of the lake was geographic, symbolic or mystical, and on this count there was nothing to do but keep the use of that element exactly the same. He no longer had Sophia’s staff, but Niede’s would do.

This left the glaring problem of precision. Even if he knew the general elemental and vital nature of the ritual, using his magic as a brute battering ram was less likely to succeed than using a proper key. To this end Sophia’s spell had required incantation, which shaped the magic by spoken instruction in the language it understood. Merlin had only half heard the words and long forgotten them. This element would have to be reconstructed from the ground up.

Intent was always the better part of ritual. Merlin began by dredging the symbol of a gate in the grey silt of the lake shore with the end of the hazelwood staff. Facing the black waters, he spoke a patchwork string of ancient commands that reached under the lake by crawling roots agitated the magic that lived there. The words were piecemeal borrowings from minor charms that untangled knots or unstuck locks; trinkets of the daily life of a thousand common people. Still, the one that stuck and pulled was the simple command _oniern_ : for a door to give way, to run, to fall upon and assail or invade. It was truest to his intent, and thus resonated with the body of his own magic.

Merlin then began to unstop the channels of that magic, transmuting it to the nature of spirit and focusing it through the staff in his left hand. This was the part of the spell that used so much magic as to consume the soul of a prince—more than two creatures of magic themselves could engender. Merlin didn’t have the soul of a prince, but he was also more than a creature of magic. He was, after all, magic itself; the most perfect conductor of natural power ever created. In a way the staff was redundant. He himself was a lightning rod much more attractive than hazel, and the magic of the earth rushed to him like the pressure of a thousand tons of water finds a pinhole in a dam. All this poured upon the surface of the lake, causing it to metamorphosize into a roiling cauldron the color of brilliant diacodos1. Seeing this, Merlin faced away from the lake and began to walk backwards.

This was a purely ritual gesture often taken in the crossing of a spiritual or metaphysical threshold. Merlin braced himself for the unpleasant shock of winter-cold water, but as he walked some imperceptible axis of the world began to shift, and each step chipped away at his comprehension of which direction he was walking. He pressed on, for there was nothing else to do, though it seemed he had been walking on dry land for a great deal longer than should be possible. At length he crossed the symbol of the gate he had drawn in the silt, and at that moment he found he was no longer walking backwards, but forwards.

Before him the tree line had become dark and twisted in the growing shadows of the night. The murmured voices of nocturnal birds carried on the wind, and as the last blush of the sun receded behind the earth’s curve the sky became so rich with stars that even on a moonless night it was no darker than twilight. The rushing of water across reeds now came from the opposite direction, and Merlin listened to it for a while, trying to make sense of it.

In between the gnarled and braided limbs of trees, themselves black silhouettes against a black night, a bright blue blaze winked into sight.

Merlin watched as the singular point of light bobbed in and out of view, stretching and throwing the shadows around it so that the whole forest seemed to dance. Initially the size of a grain of sand, it grew until it was recognizable as a flame, and then thrust out from the wood became a lantern with an attached hand. A stranger morphed out of the darkness, and as the light of his lantern passed over his face, Merlin was made still with astonishment.

“Will?” he breathed.

The face of his childhood friend pinched with confusion before breaking into a rueful smile. “Not I, friend. ‘Tis not many who would risk wearing their own face in this place.”

Indeed, the man didn’t stand like Will or speak like Will. The dissonance was painful, and Merlin wondered what kind of place this was, with such cruel customs. He crushed down the fresh spring of old grief before it could debilitate him.

“Who are you, then?” he asked.

“Taliesin, I am called.”

Merlin frowned. “You’re not… I’ve met Taliesin, he was an old man.”

“Well I’ll certainly be an old man eventually, won’t I? I’m not yet called the greatest poet to live, but I still am. Put it out of your mind. I was sent by our Lady Arianrhod to guide you, once she saw you coming.”

“Arianrhod is no Lady of mine,” Merlin replied.

Taliesin laughed, fey and mercurial. The flame of his lantern sputtered in time with his breath. “Fair enough. Regardless, you seek audience with her. Come, we ought not dawdle.”

Without waiting for a reply, he turned and headed back towards the wood. At a loss, Merlin fell in step behind him. He observed the branches of trees as they passed, and saw that they had grown curved and warped. The canopy crawled with small creatures that made little sounds of chirping and chittering and rustling.

“Where are you taking me?” Merlin asked.

“Where you want to go,” Taliesin replied smartly. “The Isle of Avalon.”

Merlin figured that was all the answer he could ask for.

Shortly they arrived on the other side of the belt of forest, and as the trees thinned Merlin caught sight of the lake once more. He did not initially recognize it as the same lake. The shore stretched practically to the far horizons, and he could not see the other side of it as the surface was cloaked in heavy mist. Not even the island itself was visible behind the silk-white veil of vapor, which seemed to capture and hold the starlight that passed through it.

A path of packed down mud had been trod into the shore, leading down to a single post sunk deep in the mire, around which the line of a battered old boat was tied in a crude buntline hitch. The boat was much the same as the kind Merlin had too often sent into the lake and burned. The only notable additions were an iron deck hook that was affixed to the bow, and the presence of a hooded passenger.

Taliesin kneeled by the post and unknotted the line. Merlin watched this at a distance, processing where this situation was leading, and whether he should be bothered by it. He decided that at this stage it wasn’t worth showing reservations, and when Taliesin gestured towards the boat he approached with only mild trepidation.

Merlin hesitated on the line where the earth met the water, peering at the shape of the stranger in the hood. “Could I ask your name?” he inquired.

Taliesin vaulted over the side of the boat and hung his lantern on the deck hook. Its eerie blue cast cut through the haze and made the face of the water as silver as the back of a mirror. “That’s Fetch. He doesn’t talk much. He’s going the same way is all.” He punctuated the statement by thumping his boot against the hull of the boat to check that it was sound, and began coiling the rope in his hands. The impression was that he would be leaving whether or not Merlin chose to board. Sensing this, Merlin capitulated and gave the boat a helping shove before hoisting himself into the weathered shell. Taliesin retrieved a single oar from under the seats and, plunging it backwards into the water, struck it against the lakebed, and as the disturbed plume of silt swirled up behind them the shoreline began to retreat.

The fog deadened all noise. The boat skated across the water so silently that even minute sounds became acutely noticeable. The pitch and changes of breath bled into the rasping protest of the old wood. Occasionally Taliesin’s oar would strike the water and briefly stir a musical whisper from it. He stood facing away from the direction he was rowing, looking down at Merlin from above. He had been looking for some time.

“By chance are you a king?” he finally asked.

Merlin blinked. “Why would I be a king?”

“You should be important, for Arianrhod to pay you such particular attention. Did you at least know any kings?”

Neither perceived it, but a charge of static briefly knitted through the water vapor around them. Merlin’s eyes became old and distant, and Taliesin was puzzled by it.

“What do you care about kings?” Merlin replied.

Taliesin sniffed. “When I’m born someday I’ll have to sing about boatloads of kings. Tis the way of this business. I figure I may as well get a head start.”

“ _When_ you’re born?”

“Well we can’t all be alive all the time, can we? I just haven’t had a go at it yet.”

“Don’t hurry,” Merlin murmured.

They lapsed into a stiff silence for a period. Merlin watched the mist stir off the end of Taliesin’s oar in a mirror of the patterns it made in the lake. The further they rowed, the less murk clouded the water. Staring into the depths, he was content to be silent.

“Surely you know _of_ kings though?” Taliesin blurted. “The great histories of your land and some such.”

“I’m a servant born to a peasant farmer and a hermit. It never mattered to me. There was a king, and a king before him, and he broke a hundred forts and slew a hundred stewards and bestowed a hundred mantles and cut off a hundred heads.2It’s all the same.”

Taliesin grew churlish. “Not if it’s told.”

Merlin left that alone. He returned to staring into the water, which even in the thick of the blue-velvet night the starlight pierced through in rays. Every once and a while the light would catch and reflect on animate shapes far below. As the lake continued to grow clearer these passing blinks became more and more frequent and brilliant, until it became like the murk of the lake and the stars of the sky had switched places.

Merlin refrained from asking until one such light bumped up against the hull of the boat, causing it to rock and groan. “What are those?”

Taliesin looked down absent-mindedly, and Merlin couldn’t tell if it was an affectation. “Hm? Those.” He turned grave. “Those are the souls of the unforgiven.”

A chill ran up Merlin’s spine. In his life he had done a great many people wrong, and the list of those who had forgiven him was vastly outnumbered by those who went to their graves with a grudge. He saw his face reflected there and shivered.

“Really?” he asked quietly.

Taliesin laughed. “No! They’re fishes. But you did think for a second, eh?”

Merlin looked dubiously at the seemingly glowing bodies. “What sort of fish is that?”

“Oh, lots of kinds. Look there, that’s a thymallus3.” He pointed, and Merlin followed the gesture to a passing glimmer. When he squinted he could make out a large spotted fin, red like rusting iron. “It smells so powerfully of thyme that anything that eats it comes to smell the same way, which is how it got its name. I’m surprised we can’t smell it now. And there, that’s a muraena. It has teeth like a wolf and is only ever female, breeding with snakes at the shore instead of its own kind.”

Merlin was beginning to get the impression that Taliesin was perhaps in the habit of telling tales. However, Fetch never raised an objection, so he couldn’t discount that such fantastic things might just be commonplace here. Taliesin continued, unbothered by the one-sided nature of the conversation.

“That,” he pointed, “is a remora. I ought to steer clear of him. They’re known to stop ships fast as anchors.”

Merlin could now see a vague outline of a long, teardrop shaped body with pointed fins. It wriggled its tail and darted towards them, but Taliesin shoved the oar into the water and diverted the boat from its course, as promised. Instead the fish was intercepted by another vague shape, which it latched onto like a suckling piglet. Merlin observed a strange interchange. The unknown creature seemed to expand three times in size, and the remora immediately went stiff and fell away.

“That one is named torpedo, because anything that touches it is infused with such poison that it grows torpid and dies before it knows what happened.”

The bloated body came briefly into clear sight, displaying a wealth of spikes thrust outward on its distended skin. Every stroke of the oar seemed to bring more clarity to the water, so that the strange bestiary beneath them was quickly becoming apparent. A ridge of spines speared through the air and Taliesin identified it as the serra, which had fins like saw blades and frequently cut boats to pieces. He seemed unworried by this.

At that moment the waves surged and bowed upwards under them like the lake itself had drawn in a long breath, and every glittering fish scattered away into unseen tangles of pondweed and crevices of stone. There came a low sound that was something like a bronze gong through covered ears. Taliesin chuckled.

“Oh, you _are_ special if _she’s_ coming out.”

Merlin didn’t have to ask. A distance in front of them a shadow the length of some small villages took form and unfurled six fins the shape of sage leaves. As the ferry drifted forwards Merlin leaned over the side and found himself staring into a single amber eye as wide around as the round table of the ancient kings, rimmed with a starburst of streaks of gold and copper, looking back at him as if _he_ were the oddity. It blinked slowly and drifted past, giving way to a long neck of scales as green as emeralds and as large as a knight’s shield. Each one came to a point and overlapped with a slight transparency, showing a warped echo of the scale beneath, creating together a system of doubled images that made the eyes believe they had somehow crossed themselves without the notice of the rest of the body. Two wide silver stripes ran down the length of six shoulders before joining in a long tail that dragged the current behind it. The fins beat like the faces of oars, but moved out of sequence in a staggered pattern that flowed down the line of them.

“Traveler,” Taliesin said, “may I introduce you to the water dragon.”

The beast had now fully passed them by, and circled around to follow them. Merlin’s heart lurched. “Is she truly a dragon?”

“No,” Taliesin answered. “A dragon would never tolerate the cold water. But she’s related, like a wyvern is.”

 _A cousin_ , Merlin thought. He reached his hand into the water as it came to pass again.

“Be careful!” Taliesin exclaimed. “She carries a terrible poison under her wings.”

Merlin resisted the urge to roll his eyes. The water dragon raised its neck to his hand and he felt the scales glide like glass under his palm. He whispered to her in dragon-tongue—not commanding, simply greeting. She hummed and the boat vibrated with the resonance so that Merlin felt it in his spine. His fingers brushed a fin and violet ink raised off it where they came into contact, but aside from a brief numbness Merlin felt nothing.

Taliesin blinked, face pinching. He had not been expecting that.

The silver tail gave a last flick before the beast had passed them again, and with her curiosity satisfied she sunk back to the bed of the lake to sleep, stirring up whirlpools in her wake. Merlin felt an unaccountable well of panic at seeing someone else _leave_. He pressed it down the same way he had with the feeling of seeing Will’s face.

“Ah,” Taliesin suddenly exclaimed, “here come the swordfish.”

Indeed, a clan of fearsome looking fish with skin like polished steel, each easily as long as full grown man at the least, had rushed into the vacated space and were stabbing at errant spinning bubbles with noses like shining lances. Though they had appeared together, each one stayed conspicuously separated from the others. One found a smaller fish caught in the eddies of the water dragon’s tail and slashed at it.

“They’re the only ones brave enough—or stupid enough—to follow the water dragon so closely. They do it with watercraft as well. They’ve been known to stab holes in boats and sink them.”

“ _Right_ ,” Merlin said. It appeared Taliesin was full of hot air—he certainly didn’t seem worried for their safety. Merlin’s mother had often told him similar tales as a child out of pure desperation to keep him out of trouble. After he accidentally flooded a stream in midsummer just by the changing of his mood, she had taken to telling him that water sprites would take him away if he got too close to the banks. He admitted his childhood was hardly normal, but these kind of warding-off stories proved universal. It was a painfully human kindness to scare people into protecting themselves.

At that moment a swordfish shot forward, and a long grey spike punched a hole in the brittle hull of the boat. Merlin stared at the hole, unable to accept that what had just happened had happened.

“For gods’ sakes man, cover it!” Taliesin shouted.

Merlin’s attention snapped back to reality, and he had the presence of mind to remove his neckerchief and stuff it in the hole. The boat was already ankle deep in water with no ready way of bailing it out, and the scrap of fabric was less than watertight. Merlin frantically muttered mending spells, but they were meant for old boots and torn shirts, not solid wood. So much of his magic was concentrated on doing damage, not undoing it.

He thought of the deep water below, full of poisonous fish and strangling plants. Maybe he wouldn’t die, but he had a feeling he would never reach Avalon, and that was the far worse fate.

“Shite. Damn. Thunderation,” Taliesin swore.

Merlin pressed both hands over the neckerchief. He could feel thin threads of current slipping past his fingers. “Will we make it to shore?”

“We might. We could, if…”

Merlin had a truly terrible feeling. “If what?”

“If there were less weight. If there were a body less weight.”

Both heads turned to Fetch.

“I think you ought to be included in this conversation,” Merlin said to the stranger.

Fetch said nothing.

“We might at least see your face,” Merlin pressed.

The stranger looked up then, still invisible behind his vestments, and something about the way his body moved in relation to itself, or maybe the lack of relation, raised the hair on Merlin’s arms. There was something uncanny to the set of his shoulders and the tilt of his head which spoke of the familiar unfamiliar. Merlin could almost articulate it, but his mind failed to supply the answer it seemed on the edge of broaching.

“Go on Fetch,” Taliesin said in a voice one might use to command an animal. “Remove your hood.”

The words seemed to animate him. Fetch reached out until two pale and bony hands slid out of the folds of his black sleeves, bending back to the crown of his head and finally pushing back the hood that hid his features. Merlin found himself looking into his own face.

To say the fetch was a mirror image of Merlin would be semantically incorrect. The ‘mirror image’ would imply the features had been reversed, as is the case when light is naturally reflected against a surface. In fact, the fetch was a perfect copy of Merlin. It was the difference between a reflection and a portrait, just different enough from the way one is accustomed to seeing one’s own image that it became subtly foreign.

“What is this?” Merlin asked in a low voice. He directed the question at Taliesin. The fetch’s eyes were vacuous and did not indicate the presence of a mind that might answer. Merlin wondered if it was even alive.

Taliesin lifted his oar and turned it over his hand so that it rested handle-down on the hull of the boat. “That’s Fetch4. I told you as much.” He closed one eye and looked down on Merlin, a terrible grin drawing on his face. He was quite pleased with himself. “For a moment you really thought, eh?”

“What do you want?” Merlin rasped. He stared into the dead eyes of the thing that wasn’t him, even though he found more and more that he hated to look at it. His fingers were still over the red neckerchief, and it wasn’t the first time he was pressing down and trying to stem a deadly flow.

“Traveler, this is _Avalon_. The immortal isle, the untold bounty, and the home of the White Goddess herself. We can’t be letting any old fool in. No, we only let in the most dedicated fools, the ones who wouldn’t flinch at _any_ price for the passage. Arianrhod saw you coming, and she truly has sent me to guide you, and I truly will lead you to the end if you desire it, but I do not know that you do. The road is long and arduous, and greater folk than you have been crushed under the heel of its adversity. The prize is always great, but you should be prepared to give more than you have ever given in exchange. What would you suffer to go where you are going? Three departed, but only two can come ashore. Could you sacrifice your very self? Could you spill your own—”

Merlin pulled Arthur’s dagger from where he had lodged it in the fetch’s ribs.

Taliesin stared. The body slumped against the warlock, head lolling over his shoulder. He hefted it away from himself and, careful not to upset the boat, turned it out into the lake. Instantly it dissolved into seafoam and dissipated into nothingness. Its blood remained painted over his right hand and made a black stain across his blue shirt, but he paid it no mind. He scarcely even blinked.

The beginning of concern was gathering on Taliesin’s brow. He saw Merlin and didn’t know quite what he was looking at. “Mate,” he said, “are you alright?”

Merlin shot him a dry look. He could have said that it was less than nothing to him. He could have said that it was a relief to finally be on familiar ground in this, and that disembodied self-sacrifice was the lowest, most banal hurdle they could have set. Stabbing himself hurt him none. He said none of this.

Taliesin puffed a breath through firmed lips. “Alright then.”

He turned his face to the lantern. Under his gaze it died low and flared up three times, illuminating the gloom with three blue flashes. Gradually, the mist began to lift like the drawing of a heavy bedcurtain. One by one the stars picked themselves out of the sky, redrawing the constellations in their ever-constant revolutions: Orion held his shield against the onslaught of Taurus, and Sirius was low on the horizon. The addition of each point of light progressively drew by negative space the outline of a towering behemoth on the horizon. More and more the air cleared; more and more the fine details of the heads of forests and steep bluffs came into view. Not long had passed before Merlin realized he was seeing the Isle of Avalon spread before him.

The structure of Avalon was remarkable in itself. The island rose steeply out of the lake as a mountain, within itself constructed of seven terraces of limestone cliff.5 At its base a cove retreated into the sheer stone and disappeared behind a waterfall which appeared to originate from near the peak of the island, while around it soft rock had eroded away into swirlholes and low, flat tables. This incline progressed into a dense deciduous forest which was smattered inconsistently across the whole island. On this first terrace it grew comely and neat, and occupied the majority of the grounds. In the distance a long building with a series of gabled rooves stretched out towards the shore.

The second terrace was clearly more developed, with the facades of high, narrow towers carved into the cliff face. The forest was sparse and a few drifts of hearth smoke smeared the sky above it. The waterfall fell here also, and Merlin fancied he could spy a bridge across the pool it had battered into the stone, but it was perhaps too far to be certain.

The verdancy of the third terrace was dark and twisted like the shore from whence they came. As Merlin watched, a flock of ravens or crows or other black birds were disturbed from their homes and rose up like a pestilence before settling again. The trees were too dense to discern much else.

On the fourth terrace the waterfall converged from a number of smaller cataracts, each overspilling from the cliff face above. The landscape itself seemed to be in the middle of repose, with the canopy slumping back towards the earth and placid water that gave it life. A single freestanding belltower stood conspicuously and imperiously above all else.

Of the fifth terrace Merlin could only see two symmetrical bridges crossing the diameter of the plateau.

In the center of this construction the face of the sixth terrace was also carved inwards, this one with punctual and mathematically perfect arches providing passage into some unknown structure. The stone was black and it was only as wide around as a large amphitheater. The terrace surface itself seemed more of a roof than a bluff, and only had room enough for the final terrace, which was an elevated dais that was small enough that the shape of it almost retreated from visibility.

However, all of these details were only clear to the second or third impression of the eye, which was first inexorably drawn to the summit itself. Just above the seventh terrace a four cornered castle made up of shining glass walls was pinned in the sky like an imitation moon, weaving radiant reflections from the night as it spun in lazy circles. Four spires overlapped and fanned apart in parallax as it rotated. Merlin was reminded of a wooden top a neighbor had carved and given to him as a child, which he used to watch until it made him dizzy.6

Soon enough they had crossed into the shallows of the cove, and the castle disappeared behind the steep walls of limestone. But as soon as Merlin had seen it, he knew. That was where Arthur was—the furthest, highest, most impossible peak. And if that was true then he was going there, and any force that wanted to stop him could line up and try.

* * *

Notes

1. Diacodos is a medieval but not technically period accurate word for a stone analogous to aquamarine.

2. Reference to The Death Song of Uther Pendragon form The Book of Taliesin. “I broke a hundred forts./ I slew a hundred stewards./ I bestowed a hundred mantles./ I cut off a hundred heads./ I gave to an old chief/ very great swords of protection.”

3. All these fish are from Merlin and Taliesin’s conversation in Vita Merlini. Thymallus real life equivalent: a type of salmon. Muraena equivalent: eels. Torpedo equivalent: pufferfish Serra equivalent: mackerel? Water dragon equivalent: ???wtf???

4. The fetch is an Irish mythological doppelganger that heralds death.

5. Glastonbury Tor (one location theorized as the basis for Avalon) and Dante’s Purgatory have the same number of terraces. Go fucking figure.

6. A nonexclusive list of things Avalon is called in Preiddeu Annwn: Caer Sidi (revolving castle), Caer Pedryvan (four cornered castle), Caer Golud (wealthy castle), Caer Wydyr (glass castle).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merlin: (removing dagger) This isn’t what I meant when I said I wanted Arthur’s tool hilt deep in my guts but I guess that’s what I get for not specifying  
> Lyric highlight, ‘Sax Rohmer #1’: “And I am coming home to you/ with my own blood in my mouth/ And I am coming home to you/ if it’s the last thing that I do.”


	3. Canto iii: Purgatorio

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canto iii soundtrack:  
> Soft Harp World - Lorenzo Tempesti  
> Greenpath – Christopher Larkin  
> I Will Stay With You – Laurent Perez Del Mar  
> Dance of the Druids – Bear McCreary  
> Blossoming Chestnut Trees – Clint Mansell  
> Temple of Sacrifice – Tom Tykwer  
> Well I Wonder – The Smiths  
> Are you ready for some gratuitous magic systems? I sure hope you’re ready for gratuitous magic systems.

The cove of Avalon was sheltered from the tide by two rock ridges imperfectly enclosing it on either side, culminating at their juncture in the cascade that tumbled over from a distant origin near the top of the island. Mist billowed over in abundance where the flow struck the water in heavy sheets, and Merlin was fleetingly troubled that Taliesin was rowing straight for it—it seemed force enough to batter a body to pulp. But then again, the awareness of his immortality made itself known like a poked bruise, and he supposed it didn’t matter either way.

As it happened, he didn’t need to worry. When the roar of the fall was close enough that he felt the air in his lungs tremor from the pressure, Taliesin simply reached out his hand and parted the water away like it was no more than a thin linen curtain. Behind it—Merlin supposed he couldn’t call it a _sea_ cave, but he also had the intangible sense that the waters they had crossed weren’t the lake he had originally come to. In any case, a flooded cave.

The water was glowing.

It was the same diacodos color of the lake in the midst of the spell, or the cauldron of Arianrhod when he had removed the enchantment on Gwen. Soft blue-green shapes drew and redrew themselves on the cave walls, suggesting movement that may or may not have been there. It wasn’t magic but it felt alive, with each rippling wave turning up vibrant streaks of color. He supposed it shouldn’t impress him after the floating castle, but he found it beautiful all the same.

A wide ledge of stone ran along the wall to the left of them, which Merlin correctly guessed would be their means of egress. Somewhat unceremoniously, Taliesin lashed the boat to a column of rock and climbed ashore. He did not capsize the boat but it was a near thing. Merlin followed behind and quickly realized from the ease of it that this had been on purpose.

A shadow became a head and a set of shoulders and Merlin barely suppressed the impulse to strike it down on sight.

He conjured a ball of light instead. The stranger blinked, and it took Merlin a long moment to realize the face was familiar, and another to place it. It was Eira, the lone survivor from one of Morgana’s last sieges. However, working on the context clues of what he already knew and her stiff, regal manner of dress (not to mention her massive longsword), he felt it was safe to assume this was not truly Eira.

Taliesin spoke to the stranger. “Many thanks for the fair waters.”

The stranger looked at Taliesin with an expression of condescension, exasperation, and detest that was both perfectly restrained and still completely readable. “And what shall I tell your mother?”

There was a flash of indignation on Taliesin’s face before he cleanly put it away. “He’s here, isn’t he?”

Merlin gleaned that it was in fact himself that was being referred to. “Hello.”

The stranger nodded at him, clearly pausing at the state of his tunic, and immediately turned back to Taliesin. “So it is.”

Merlin didn’t know he still had the capacity to feel something so banal as annoyance, but being called ‘it’ was provocation enough. He charmed the tunic clean under his breath. “Sorry,” he cut in, “who are you?”

The stranger looked at him sharply. “I am the one who rolled up the mist. That is enough to know me by.”

Taliesin clapped Merlin on the shoulder, pulling their heads together conspiratorially. “Don’t take it personally. Names have power here, and people mind it.”

Merlin frowned. “You told me your name.”

“Well I’m not afraid of you, am I?” Taliesin smiled wide and showed his teeth at the one who rolled up the fog. She simply shook her head and melted into the shadows of the cave. The poet scowled after her before turning and making for the entrance.

Merlin fell in step behind him, watching his footing so as to keep upright on the uneven erosions of rock. Though his mind was numb and quiet, some part of it was still thinking, and that part grasped ineffectively at the details of the short conversation.

“Your mother?” he finally asked.

Taliesin sighed, offering Merlin a hand up as he clambered up behind the waterfall and into the open air. Merlin hesitated but took it. “I’m more a ward than a son. The one who rolled up the mist was just being an ass and implying things. Because it’s not like _her_ power has anything to do with _her_ parentage.” He rolled his eyes. This didn’t answer the central question of _who_ , but Merlin had a feeling he wouldn’t get a straight answer if he asked, so he let it lie.

Pocked and smoothed-down slag leveled out in shelves and became fraught with scraggly weeds. Weeds became grass, and grass became trees. Merlin looked over his shoulder in passing and stopped—on the far side of the cove, where the beach stone met the water, a small herd of wild horses were wading in the shallows. They stood on long limbs and had wetted-down manes that may have been hair and may have been kelp, with black hides that turned green at the edges when they moved, like the bicolor weft and waft of a finely woven cloth.

“Kelpies,” Taliesin remarked, following his gaze. “Nasty old brutes. Be glad there’s a bay between us.”

Merlin didn’t hear him, lost in remembering. The unicorn had been a beautiful but unassuming white mare, less otherworldly and more just another living thing that was itself an arm of nature. There wasn’t much comparison to draw, but he found himself falling through the years all the same. A creature made in the same shape as a beast of burden. An act of violence with momentous consequence. A test of love.

The world had seemed so different to him then, when he had been so young. Anhorra had declared that Arthur had proven what he held in his heart, and Merlin had felt the crystalizing possibility of a hundred charmed futures that had, in the end, never come to pass. But at that moment he only knew that Arthur would live, and Arthur was good, and there was more road ahead of them than behind. It was perhaps more perfect to live under the promise of a distant happiness than to see it come to pass and find it lesser.

When Merlin came back to awareness of the present Taliesin was nattering on about the ecology. He stopped at the foot of a stout tree and pulled down an apple, holding it up for Merlin to see. Normally an island this size couldn’t be expected to support much life, but Avalon was known as the isle of plenty for a reason. Everything necessary and fruitful the earth produced for itself, bearing bountiful harvests in every season without the tending of any hand. The activity of farming only went as far as walking into fields of wild wheat and cutting down as much as would feed hungry mouths. Apple trees—for which the island was named1—grew uncommonly hale and sagged with the weight of fat yellow fruits, and what couldn’t be pressed into cider and baked into pies reunited with the soil and started life again. This was partly due to the water, which rose from a natural spring and ran clear and sweet as wine. The rest could only be attributed to the good will of the gods.

Walking through the wood, Merlin spotted what he first thought was a snowdrift. While this would not have been totally incongruous in early winter, snowdrifts don’t commonly move under their own power. He stepped towards it without thinking and was suddenly mobbed by tiny noses.

Merlin fell hard on his back, propping himself against a tree as the swarm of small, fluffy creatures piled on top of him. In form they were something like the general suggestion of a rabbit, or the outline of a rabbit that was still deciding. They had shining beady eyes and long ears, and Merlin certainly felt the battering of their tiny legs, but they lacked details and shifted in ways that defied anatomy or common physics. They were charming all the same. Merlin chuckled as one nosed under his still damp neckerchief.

(Taliesin laughed too. It was the first time he had seen Merlin smile, but the expression still felt like a pale imitation.)

As they pressed against him, the not-rabbits greyed and took on the color of charcoal. Merlin watched this with amazement. He reached out and stroked one between the ears, and it nudged against his fingers as its fur turned black as pitch. They were warm, which made Merlin realize he hadn’t been warm in a while.

Taliesin was looking at him oddly. It was similar to the face he had made when Merlin killed the fetch.

“What?” Merlin prodded.

“Nothing.”

A not-rabbit nibbled at his fingers, and Merlin pulled it to his chest. “What are they called?”

“Púca2,” Taliesin answered. “The common misconception is that they bring luck. In actuality they feed on it.” He stopped for a moment, pressing his lips together. “They turn white with good luck and black with bad.”

Merlin looked down at the mob of black animals. He sighed. “Could you pass me an apple? I think I might be here a while.”

Taliesin obliged. The apple was crisp and sweet, like the best part of the highest days of harvest. After a moment of thought he retrieved Arthur’s dagger from his belt and cut a slice from the fruit. Holding the knife was grounding to him—it was reassuring to put his hand where Arthur’s had been. He offered it to the púca, but they were soundly disinterested in material goods.

Merlin heard a footstep and became alert from the soles of his boots to every last hair on his head. He showed no outward sign of change, accustomed to playing the fool. Taliesin looked up, and Merlin looked at Taliesin instead. The poet was unperturbed, and so Merlin let himself believe that he was reacting to his own hard won paranoia and nothing else. He assumed this was at least no foe.

The púca, also on the alert, stood on their hind legs and looked about themselves. As quickly as they had come the abandoned Merlin for fresher prey, surging in their own wobbling furs over a pair of embroidered slippers. There was a sharp inhale, and a freshly gathered bundle of chamomile3 fell from a slender hand and bopped a púca over the head. It paid no mind, burrowing further into the fray, hungry for misfortune.

Merlin finally looked up. Morgana stared down at him with wide eyes.

Merlin checked himself. He had no reason to believe this was actually Morgana. He assured himself that it was only the traced semblance—

“Merlin?”

This was no impostor.

Merlin froze, unsure whether to flee or fight. Morgana had been restored to the height of her glory, glowing with health and with light in her eyes, her hair still unpinned but no longer unkempt, wearing colors for the first time since she left Camelot. Her army had always worn black as the sole funeral rite to the uncounted fallen who had come before. This Morgana had apparently gone beyond the need for death.

“I know it’s you. You’re still soft on animals, I see.” Morgana’s brow twitched, and it was the only betrayal of the conflict behind her practiced political mask.

Merlin was still holding the dagger. His fingers tightened around it, and his opposite palm came to rest on the ground so he could push himself and run at a moment’s notice. Morgana saw this and a look passed through her eyes that Merlin recognized because it was kin to his own soul: a moral and mortal exhaustion that the world kept throwing itself down upon one’s heart.

“Stay your hands,” Morgana said. “The time for that is past, I think.”

Merlin could detect no falsehood in her. But inaction led to questions, as Merlin had so often and bitterly learned. “You’re dead.”

“You killed me,” Morgana retorted. “And I have died. I can even confidently say that I am no longer alive. But whether that is the same as being dead…my position had its perks.”

Merlin was silent for a long time. “I’m glad.”

And he was. Morgana would always be his greatest regret. If she could be at peace somewhere, if the world had a place for her after war and death, how could he be anything but glad?

Morgana softened. “I as well.”

Taliesin cleared his throat. Merlin had quite forgotten about him. “I see you know each other. Traveler, why don’t we meet up later so you can speak with your friend?”

Merlin briefly wondered what kind of friends Taliesin had that he took an accusation of murder as proof of good feeling. He opened his mouth to object, but Taliesin was already making himself scarce, perhaps rightfully offput. The warlock leaned against the apple tree and pushed himself to his feet. He sheathed the dagger.

“You’re not going to kill me? Not even a little friendly stabbing?” he asked. The joke sounded flat even to his own ears.

Morgana shook her head, and a curl of hair bobbed over her shoulder. She drew a breath and hesitated. “I always thought…even for a moment at Camlann, for a moment I thought, maybe in another life we might have…not been at odds. And, well. Here we are in another life.”

Merlin felt like his chest had been kicked in. Of course he had considered the same what-ifs, from the moment he took a bottle of poison and made a woman a necessary evil. Potentialities, eventualities, destinies, balanced on the edge of a knife. The Labyrinth of Gedref had a thousand branches but only one exit. That’s the cruelty of a maze.

“Come with me,” she said, “I want you to be welcome in my home.”

She said it with an odd determination, and Merlin told himself he had no choice but to follow. She led the way through the untamed orchard until they came into the outlying clearing of the building with the gabled rooves that Merlin had first seen from the ferry. Up close it had the character of a monastery, though obsidian stonework took it out of comparison with any human feat of architecture. Each black stone contained subtle hues of green and purple, never quite there when the eye looked directly upon it.

Merlin quickly surmised that as long as he had kept walking the building would have eventually made itself unavoidable. It ran the length of the radius of the terrace, emerging from the cliff face at one end and running into the sea. The peaked rooves made it look like a saw resting lightly on the rind of the sky. A line of shin-high arches punctuated the sides. It was functionally a wall, but it was difficult to tell which side was meant to be the inside and which was meant to be the outside.

There was a door at its middle, and a sentry in front of the door. Merlin saw the blond locks and the polished armor and immediately froze. He knew he had been seen because Morgause seemed to grow taller under her mail, and her hand fell to the pommel of her sword.

 _Of course. She was a high priestess as well. Of course_ , Merlin thought. But his thoughts couldn’t stop there. _It wasn’t on purpose. I didn’t meant to throw her that hard, I didn’t know she would_ —

“Be civil,” Morgana chided her sister. “He’s my guest.”

The more important half of the conversation was unspoken. Merlin couldn’t divine what passed between them but he understood it was happening, the same way a dog knows to comfort or cower from the tone of a word. Morgause looked at him with incredible venom, which he figured was fair. In the days long past there had been Morgause and Morgana, and then the retaking of Camelot, and then there had only been Morgana. Merlin still sometimes heard Morgana’s scream in his dreams, saw her eyes burning fire-bright and her hands clutched tight over her sister’s armor as her sheer force of grief tore down the castle around them.4

Morgause stood aside and they passed each other like strangers. Behind him, he heard her murmur. “I knew there was something more.”

The old scar where the serket sting had entered his back ached at the memory.

The inside of the building was a feat of art and nature. They entered into a long hall with a slanted floor laid with blue ceramic tiles, each side terminating in tall wooden doors. The function of the low arches became apparent—they were scuppers that let out flooding, and when waves broke against the furthest edge of the building they let in a shallow tide of water that fanned out briefly over the far end of the tile before receding back into the lake. This weathering had created two contrasting gradients across the floor, fading the tile from marine to pale, and inversely darkening the binding between the tiles from white to murky black.

“The water will get in eventually. Better to let it go where it pleases,” Morgana explained. “This place is both our castle and our keep. In exchange for our second lives, my sisters and I keep vigil guarding the door to the upper realms. Of course we rarely have to do anything. It’s a lot like being a lord.”

As Merlin was looking, a stray pair of púca wandered through the scuppers on the left wall and left again from the scuppers on the right. Morgana crossed to a carved table and added what remained of her bundle of chamomile to an overflowing stock of herbs, and with a wave of her hand the dormant torches in inlaid wall sconces lit up and brightened the room. Merlin thought he saw her smile in a mischievous way that instantly transported him to his first days at Camelot.

“Look up,” she said.

The pendentive domed ceiling was painted in gold and a robin’s egg blue derived of gypsum and azurite, inscribing the wheels of magic around a central oculus.5

The outermost wheel, the compass, was naturally oriented according to the true direction of North, and in looking at it Merlin confirmed that North was still exactly where it was supposed to be. A sorcerer who lost their compass bearings was a very poor sorcerer, after all. The middle wheel, the wheel of life, was marked by the runes that were most associated with the practices of its respective magics: clockwise starting from east, Birth, Inspiration, Spirit, Despair, Death, Pain, Body, and Healing. The innermost wheel was detailed with eight sections of fine glass mosaic, each depicting vignettes of the magics of the wheel of the elements. Beneath the rune for birth a wash of flame made up of tiles the color of pomegranates stood out starkly between the pale gold rays of Light and the dull silver geometry of Stone. Air was depicted as a fair-weather sky, Storm as a splinter of lightning across bruising clouds, Water as curling waves, and Earth as the green husk of nature over brown soil. But Merlin particularly fixated on the Northwest corner of the wheel of the elements—a shimmering pale-and-white mountain buried under heavy snow, and a lake choked with ice flows.

In eight years of studying magic, Merlin had learned to treasure every scrap of information he could find. He had one complete spell book that he protected like it was an extension of his own life, and even that was a pell-mell collection of garden variety enchantments and personal observations. Gaius had tomes upon tomes of bestiaries, lapidaries, histories and herbariums, but any magical guidance within these was strictly limited to how to cure or kill. Anything beyond this was no more than torn pages and ash. So while he had seen reference to the wheels of magic in frustratingly obscure fragments often enough to have reconstructed most of it for himself, the space between water and earth had eluded him. For a long time he assumed it had to be some kind of mud—he had noticed there seemed to be a lot of mud in sorcery. Later he had thought it might be verdancy, since the rune associated with the corresponding spot on the wheel of life was marked by ᚦ, thorn.

He tried to phrase the question like he was an actual scholar of magic. “Is the—is the element that corresponds with Northwest snow?”

Morgana looked at him like he had asked what color the sky was. “It’s ice. At rest Ice corresponds with Northwest on the compass and Pain on the wheel of life. Did you not..?”

Merlin crossed his arms over his chest. The damp neckerchief was starting to chafe. “No one knew. The knowledge died with the people.”

“But not all the people died,” Morgana said.

Merlin knew that between the two of them, Morgana was far more adept with magic. She had been trained by the remaining authorities of the old religion for years, apprenticing as blood guard before being elevated to high priestess. She was equally powerful manipulating stone, fire, and air, and was proficient with both divination and pain, which were at opposite ends of their wheel. Merlin hadn’t seen her heal, but had reason to believe she could considering how often she got up from fatal blows. In many ways she was a far more appropriate representative of magic-kind than Merlin, whose magic was more of a blunt instrument and who had learned most of what he knew from half-burned books.

This set Merlin to wondering. Every mage had a nature that their magic was bent towards even at rest, when no conscious effort was being exerted and nothing was being altered. Morgana’s magic had first manifested as Fire and Divination, which were aligned with East and Southeast respectively. He had long suspected her bearing, but never confirmed it.

“Is your bearing East? If I can ask that.” Merlin said faux-casually.

“No need for battle secrets now, I suppose. It is,” Morgana replied. “And you?”

“Southwest,” Merlin answered.

Morgana hummed. “Storm and Despair. How poetic.”

He supposed it had to be.

“My mother had nightmares all through her pregnancy. She called me her little terror.” He smiled wanly. “With the elements I can do most things if I’m not thinking about it, but I can’t scry to save my life, let alone heal properly.”

“Well, yes. That would be on the total opposite side of the wheel to your natural bearing, and the wheel of life is more stubborn than the elements. There’s a reason I relied so heavily on creatures to do anything that contrary to my nature.”

Merlin flinched before he could stop himself. The thin silver scar across the nape of his neck was insignificant compared to some of the other marks he bore, and he never saw it, but it was there. Mind-control fell between Death and Spirit—Despair—and thus was solidly Southwest. Morgana pretended not to see, staring into the torchlight instead.

“I can’t bring storms,” she continued, “but it might be purely mental—all magic is purely mental. Thunder makes me…” She trailed off.

Morgana didn’t say _because of you_ , but Merlin understood. He started fires by hand because habit was a kind of security, but when he couldn’t avoid conjuring it his heartbeat never settled until the afterimages vanished behind his eyelids. Then again, he imagined there wasn’t a sorcerer alive who didn’t fear flames.

“Or maybe I just can’t,” Morgana finished. “The visualization never went well to begin with.”

“Visualization?” Merlin blurted.

Morgana looked at him that way again, like it was a miracle he was still alive. “Merlin, how do you do magic?”

It was an extremely loaded, open ended question. Merlin hedged. “I don’t know. It’s natural, isn’t it? You reach for it, and it’s there.”

A long moment of uncomfortable silence passed.

“I don’t know whether to fear or pity you,” Morgana finally said. “Clearly no one has ever taught you anything useful, so I’m going to treat you as I would treat any of my initiates. Come,” she commanded.

It was not a request. Morgana came to stand under the dome, and Merlin did the same. He was mildly incensed to be so patronized, but he couldn’t deny she was right. Gaius was a renowned magical scholar in his day, but the purge had left strange and ineffable marks on his soul, and while he was perfectly happy to talk about magic in the theoretical, practical instruction had never been an option. The pursuit of knowledge was one Merlin had taken utterly alone.

Morgana sat facing the center of the room cross-legged under the murals of the East, and Merlin took it as a cue to do the same under the Southwest. The buckles of his boots scraped the floor awkwardly, and he made the conscious effort no to bounce his knee. He didn’t like to be idle—his body had grown out of the habit.

“Magic,” she began, “is power changing from one state to another. You are the conduit of that change. When magic passes through you, it finds certain kinds of change easier or more difficult based on your nature. We can’t truly understand why this is, or why magic behaves the way it does. But we can create ways of thinking about that behavior that make it easier to navigate. Thus the wheels of magic. If we can picture vital magics like life and death, body and spirit, and elemental magics—fire, water, earth, so on—as concentric wheels within the compass, we can begin to understand how they relate to each other.

“We’ll begin with a simple exercise. Become aware of the current of magic running through you and feel the elemental nature it wants to take.”

This was easy enough. Merlin was always aware of the magic around him, and it was more of an active choice to stop channeling it than to use it. He felt the latent power in the stones, the air, the fire burning from the torches, and passively observed the way it used him like a riverbed. It wanted to overflow its banks and find the path of least resistance, but Merlin suppressed it easily even as he felt out the direction it was constantly pulling towards—the smell of ozone after lightning strike, the battering fingers of heavy rain, the deafening chorus of howling wind and roaring thunder that rattled the ribs and always seemed to be on the edge of drawing a primal scream from the lungs.

He didn’t realize he had lost the battle to still his restless leg until Morgana reached out with magic and did it herself. “Focus. Take that current and picture it radiating away from you in a line that stretches far into the Southwest, past where you can see or know.”

This too was easy; it felt like that line of power belonged there. Like there was some point beyond the horizon that was the terminus of his own bolt of lightning. Maybe it was just because it was behind him, and it was easy to believe what he couldn’t see.

“Good. Now you’re going to rotate the wheel. Put that Storm in the Northwest.”

Merlin faltered. “What?”

“Keep up,” Morgana chided. “The logic of magic doesn’t exist on the physical plane. But by imagining it as relating to the physical plane, we can better conceptualize how to move our non-physical magic. Birth doesn’t belong to the East, but we all agree it starts there do that we can relate Death to it in the same way we relate East to West. I can’t imagine the difference between Birth and Death, but I can imagine turning from the East to the West. Thus I imagine Birth is the East, and that it is switching positions with Death by rotating from the East to the West. So take that imaginary line that represents your natural tendency towards Storm and imagine that instead of Southwest it’s traveling towards the Northwest. When you’ve rotated this imaginary wheel one quarter of the way around, the element on the wheel that will be where Storm previously was will be—”

Light.

As easily as breathing, orbs of lambent golden light burst into being like soap bubbles overflowing a tub. They clumped together and floated upwards, buoyed by unknowable forces up into the shell of the dome, where they created a riot of colored sparkles off the surface of the glass tiles to the effect of a ray of sunlight passing through a crystal prism. Merlin laughed out of pure surprise, briefly blinded by his own work. Having been unconscious for the duration of the mortaeus flower debacle, he didn’t know he had ever been capable of such a thing.

Morgana was smiling warmly, face dotted with rainbow freckles of light. In that moment they felt the same thing: a pure, honest love of this endless mystery that lived in them. It had come to them differently. For Merlin it was the only companion who had been with him for the entire long-short road of his life, as integral to himself as his own blood. For Morgana it was the revelation that burned through her life and made it new, which she had ultimately chosen _above_ her own blood. And they each loved it—for all it had branded and scarred them, they loved it inconsolably.

Morgana broke the reverie. “Good, but we’re not done yet. If you can already do elemental magic wordless, vital magic shouldn’t be that difficult.”

Merlin recalled his nightmarish encounters with the principle use of Inspiration, divination. “Oh, I beg to differ.”

He had never felt at ease with the wheel of life. Visions were unreliable, healing was nonexistent, and he only achieved body transfiguration with extensive help from potions. When he struck down Nimueh Gaius had proudly declared that he had mastered the power of Life and Death, but it had never properly answered to his call since. Some part of him whispered that it that it was _because_ of Nimueh, that after her death using it again was unthinkable. Magic was, after all, _purely mental_. _And really_ , he thought, _how could I embrace vital magic when my natural bearing there is Despair?_

“Counter-rotating,” she persisted, “is the practice of using one of the wheels to leverage another. As I’ve mentioned, the wheel of life is more stubborn than the elements. Life and Death do not want to be moved, ever. We do it anyways. To make this less burdensome, it helps to give with one hand and take with the other, so to speak. For instance, the northern _vital_ magic of Body will not want to go South. But it’s achievable to put Earth, the northern _elemental_ magic, in the South. Still, Earth would certainly rather go back to the North where it belongs. So if I rotate Earth into the South and then try to rotate both wheels together so that Body is South and Earth is North, Earth’s natural tendency to return to North will do part of the work for me. Let’s try.”

Morgana removed a curved dagger from the waist of her dress and made a small slice over the width of her palm before Merlin could stop her. Years of physician training ran circles in his head, trying to recall what herbs he had seen growing in the forest and wondering whether the water here was clean. He felt nauseous.

“Heal it,” she ordered. She didn’t mean with poultices.

“I can’t.”

“Yes you can. Put Storm in the Northeast and try.”

“I can’t!”

“You can!” Merlin flinched again at the all too familiar tone. “If you can’t do it now, then how can you hope to even try when it’s not me but your own comrade on his last breaths left to live, and not here but in an active battle with a fresh company of knights due before the dying of the hour? Do you want me to live or not?”

For the first time since Camlann, Merlin felt rage.

How dare she leverage his pain? How dare she speak as if she knew of war or loyalty or loss like he did, when he had seen into the mouth of hell itself and ripped its very teeth out rather than be swallowed. (She did. She always did, had only been further along on the same journey with less scruples about the methodology of her personal justice.)

Damned if he was going to fail. Damned if he would lose to her now, when there was nothing left _to_ lose. Storm in the Northeast, the wind the Romans called Vulturnus that Seneca said spat dust in the eyes of soldiers. He lets it rush back to its natural bearing and pulls Healing with it until it clicks into place on the leyline that is himself.

The cut seals from one end to the other. Morgana wipes away the blood and it’s as if it was never there. Merlin—

Merlin falls apart.

A trembling starts in the tips of his fingers and consumes his body whole. He clamps his hand over his mouth and screams the scream the storm begged for, because he is too tired of crying and he has no tears left. Above them each bubble of light burst violently into sparks, and the embers of them burned holes in the back of his tunic, but he couldn’t care. He could fix it. He could fix anything.

A funeral procession of beloved faces paraded across his vision. Will with the arrow stuck deep in the muscle of his abdomen, cracking wise and defending Merlin even to the last breath. Freya bleeding out from a wide, blooming gash to the leg as Merlin promised to show her the mountains. His own father, who he knew for all of two days before seeing his skin rent open by the swords of men Merlin couldn’t even remember the allegiance of. Elyan bleeding out in Gwen’s arms on the stones of the dark tower. And always, always Arthur, drawn and pale from loss of blood, eyelids growing heavier by the minute but still smiling like he could actually convince Merlin this was somehow going to be okay, dear and fading and taking the world with him.

“The whole time, I could have,” he said, breath shaking. “No one told me. No one told me!”

He could have saved all of them.

Morgana’s hands were tight on his shoulders. She called his name, but he didn’t hear. The wind ran with the fury of wild horses, whistling over the oculus in a screech fit for a choir of banshees. Every torch snuffed out in an instant, plunging the room into darkness that yawned wide and deep. Healing slipped away, and Merlin Despaired.

Morgana still held him, still called for him. Merlin’s misery lashed out like something physical, hooking into her bones and crashing over in waves. She let it wash over her and pressed her forehead to his.

The sky wailed, and the boy was quiet. A numb exhaustion suffused his muscles, shutting out the screaming of his nerves and the rolling of his stomach until he became something resembling human again. He shivered with cold that wasn’t there. Morgana pressed a hand to the side of his face.

“Be at peace, old friend. Regret is for the living.”

Merlin froze. The last of the warmth in his body leeched out onto the cerulean tiles. Morgana’s strange hospitality suddenly made a horrible kind of sense.

Morgana thought Merlin was dead.

Morgana thought that the two of them had finally been made equal in death, and with the long ledger of terrors they had heaped upon each other wiped clean, they could finally meet each other plain. She thought that the fates were done tallying his life and had already distributed his rightful judgement. She showed tenderness only for his shade.

“Merlin,” she said. “I have to ask. The way you reacted…does Arthur live?”

She was utterly serious. Merlin could almost laugh, could almost taste blood in his throat.

“One of us lives while the other is departed. That is fate’s decision.”

Her shoulders sagged. She looked up through the oculus, towards the infinite globe of the heavens, into the cloudy belt of the winter stars. “Then I failed Mordred at the last. Do you think it’s wrong that some part of me is glad? Truly, I hate King Arthur to my last drop of blood, but he happens to share a body with my brother who I loved like my own heart. I wish him dead more earnestly than most men love their mothers, but if he did die I know I would mourn. He is my last living family. Fate surpassed cruelty to turn blood against blood and then shun the kin-killers this way.”

“Someone told me recently that destiny is notoriously cruel,” Merlin whispered.

She nodded, squeezing his shoulders once before releasing him. “You should rest. There has been too much.”

He had too agree. They leaned on each other as they stood, and Morgana led him to the seaward door. Water seeped into their shoes, but Morgana didn’t seem to mind. The door opened to a staircase that led up to a corridor elevated above the sea, with doors to personal chambers lining either side. Merlin almost asked why they hadn’t built the whole building at this height, but he was too tired. He followed her to an unused bedchamber with sea lavender on the window ledge and slept like the dead.

When Merlin woke again it was still dark. He was beginning to wonder if the sun would rise at all. Or maybe he had not slept that long; maybe his body refused to fully cede wakefulness. Either way, he knew he couldn’t linger. He had already spent too long in this place.

The hall was empty. Soft murmuring was barely audible behind one of the doors, but it was otherwise silent as the inside of a stone. Merlin stepped lightly and made no sign of his presence. His dagger was safely fastened in his belt, and his clothes were newly mended. His boots did not scrape and the floor did not creak, silently abetting his desertion. It was almost without incident. However, mere steps from the top of the staircase Merlin realized the door he was just then passing was cracked open just as candlelight spilled across his face.

He stopped, rooted to the spot. Unwillingly his eyes flicked to the door, and through the sliver of a gap he could see the figure of a woman leaning over a bedpost—the face round and pale like the moon, the slick coils of hair dark as soil, garbed in wine red silks that spoke of more prosperous times. Her eyes fairly glowed with their brilliant blue hue. Nimueh raised a single finger to her stained lips and smiled.

Merlin fled. He descended the staircase and crossed the long tiled hall, never once looking up. The cliffside door was bolted and reinforced with iron, and try as he might he couldn’t get it to budge. Just when his arms threatened to give out from pushing, there was a clatter and a clunk, and the door groaned open inch by spare inch, giving way to a now familiar face.

“Taliesin?!” Merlin whispered.

“Hello again, traveler!” he said. “You took your time.

“Well, pardon me,” hissed Merlin.

Taliesin grinned devilishly. “Move along, this won’t stay open forever.”

“Stop.”

Morgana’s voice echoed across the high ceilings. Her skirts fanned wide behind her as she walked with clipped steps across the length of the room. Her eyes were hard as flint. “Why…” She looked between the two of them, finally settling on merlin like a weight as understanding rose in her face. “You are alive.”

“I never lied,” Merlin replied, voice flat. “One of us lives while the other is departed. Mordred is avenged, for as long as it takes me to get through this wretched place.”

“Of course. You never lie, do you?” Morgana took another step forward, putting them face to face. “My only duty in this life is to guard that door. Do you understand?”

He did. Merlin felt the weight of the dagger at his side, felt the pulse of magic in his veins, felt the force of winds that flatten trees that will not bend. He allowed the shape of himself to become deadly, resolved that if it came to this he was not unprepared.

Morgana saw this and took on that same look that spoke of pain so long suffered that it left only weariness. She looked into him and through him, trying to understand what kind of being he was that had been underlying the whole construction of their lives without speaking a word. And she mourned, for a brother dead, for an equal lost, for a tangle of inextricable lives so choked together that fate’s only salvation was to cut them all down to the roots.

“If I try to stop you, will you kill me?” she asked.

“Yes,” merlin replied. He did not hesitate and he did not consider.

“Then that is all that needs to be said.”

Morgana reached out with both hands and shoved Merlin backwards through the door. He stumbled back, head colliding with Taliesin’s shoulders. No sooner than she had done this, the door gave a momentous shudder and begin to inch closed, and seeing her face, Merlin at once came to understand the true price he was paying for his passage. He wanted to tell her that it was not out of hatred, that he never _wanted_ to harm her, that whatever tattered threads of kinship they had felt were not feigned, and that he too thought that maybe in another life they would have been true friends. It was just that _anything_ weighed against saving Arthur would lose. He wanted to tell her this, but the tomb-like door sighed shut, and she was hidden from him forever.

* * *

In his dream, Arthur was there and not there. He was observing as passively as a buzzing fly, or the sun itself looking down on creation. Only there was no sun here, only dim torchlight and dimmer shadows.

He knew this place. The subterranean cavern had been a secret even to him until the last few years before his father’s death, but he had sometimes gone there in his kingship when he was deep in consideration of the meaning of legacy. Arthur’s father was a complex figure. Arthur was still teasing out the ways in which Uther’s actions had shaped him, and to what ends. He hadn’t often agreed with his father, but his station meant that he had been reared to be the only person alive who could understand the man. And he didn’t, not even now.

The shock of learning that the Great Dragon had come from inside Camelot was second only to the shock that Uther had put it there. _How could a king do that?_ he had wondered. _How could he willingly bring danger under the homes of the people he had sworn to protect?_ In the wake of the dragon’s attack, while the rooves of peasant homes where still smoldering with blue smoke and the grave-dirt was freshly turned, he had asked Uther why he did it.

“An example had to be set,” was all Uther said.

“Was it attacking?” Arthur had asked.

Uther looked at him like he was intolerably slow. Arthur was used to this. “It was a _dragon_ , Arthur. It would have turned vicious eventually.”

It was the same look Uther had given him when he had brought allegations of misconduct against the knights who, company under Arthur’s first command, had mutinied against him and slaughtered the druid camp. Arthur didn’t understand what it was that he didn’t understand that made their actions acceptable to the king. He didn’t understand how so many knights saw this and shook if off like so much water, when he hadn’t slept for days. When Uther looked at him like that was easy for him to believe that he was the stupid one for not understanding.

He had felt small, which wasn’t even an inaccurate appraisal at the time. He hadn’t yet filled out his armor; he was thirteen years old.

In his dream, Merlin was standing in the cavern, holding a torch aloft in one hand and a sword in the other. The dragon rattled its chains as it descended from hidden heights, perching on the ridge in the center of the hollow. The two exchanged words, and were clearly acquainted. Merlin seemed agonized. He descended the stairs into the pit and climbed up to the beast’s foot. 

He cut the dragon free.

* * *

Notes

1. In Vita Merlini Geoffery of Monomouth refers to Avalon as Insula Pomorum, the isle of fruit trees. More directly, Avalon is probably derived from aball or avallen, from Old Welsh/Cornish/Breton, meaning apple or fruit tree. Apples have been associated with immortality for a very long time, so that’s probably in the mix somewhere.

2. Fairies: Púca are Irish folkloric shape-changers that appear as white or black common animals and bring good or bad luck. The Welsh mythology counterpart is the pwca, and the Cornish counterpart it the bucca. Kelpies are fun water horses that like to drown people in their spare time.

3. Hanakotoba of the day: Chamomile – Power born from adversity. Lavender – Devotion, silence, distrust.

4. There are several points in the series where Merlin defeats someone and never explicitly finds out that they survive. Morgause is one of them.

5. For reference, this is mostly the same structure as the ceiling of the Hagia Sophia. It must be noted that this building makes no physical, architectural, or historical sense.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can you tell I’m obsessed with light lol  
> Morgana is just trying to lead guided meditation but Merlin keeps screaming like the grinch yoga vine  
> Lyric highlight, ‘Well I Wonder’: “Well I wonder/ Do you see me when we pass?/ I have died,/ Please keep me in mind.”


	4. Intermezzo i: Damocles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Intermezzo soundtracks are half-length to match the chapters.  
> Intermezzo i soundtrack:  
> Seafolk Village - Darren Ang  
> Adagio of Life and Death - Joe Hisaishi  
> An Ordinary Face - Takatsugu Muramatsu  
> Love Love Love - The Mountain Goats

The Lady of the Lake sharpened the sword. Why did she sharpen the sword?

Excalibur did not dull or rust. Every molecule was locked in a stasis that could easily last thousands of years, even at the bottom of a lake. The sword didn’t know time. In its own way, it didn’t know violence: it might spill blood, but that blood would never _happen_ to it. It drained down the fuller and sloughed off the handle, and when it was gone it had never touched the sword at all.

Yet Freya sat on her stone bench looking over the lake and dragged a whetstone over the length of its cutting edges until they sang. She found a rag and oiled it so that the wet air would never even know what it was failing to decay. She did all this knowing full well that she may as well have spent her hours teaching fish to fly, and despite being an eminently pragmatic person.

Before her, Arthur had sharpened it purely out of ignorance. Good weapons care was drilled into him from youth, and even if he had noticed that it didn’t seem to make much difference it would hardly have stopped a long suffered good habit. It was also the kind of rhythmic simple action that brought rare quiet to his mind, and he certainly didn’t begrudge if it kept him away from counsel for a few minutes. The sword reminded him that he was needed, and what he was needed for. It didn’t hurt to give it attention.

Merlin found it obscurely funny to see Arthur trying so hard at its upkeep when he himself had previously thrown it in a lake and left it there, and naturally never let on. Offering to sharpen Excalibur for the king was also a handy way to get a free break in. But even he was also occasionally prone to honing its edges with no rational explanation, even to himself.

There was the time in Howden, at the foot of the White Mountains.

The still newly crowned King Arthur had been on a tour of the kingdom, making his presence known to lackluster lords and endeavoring to learn the needs of the common people. While dining in the hall of the local lord, the man’s son mentioned sightings of a huge, hairless rat that had been wreaking havoc on the outer settlements.

“That’s a wilddeoren,” Merlin commented later that night.

“They’ve never been seen this far south,” Arthur replied.

“What it is is not our business. I trust you won’t do anything rash, sire.” Leon added.

Merlin and Arthur exchanged an eloquent look.

Later, so late it was technically early, Merlin saddled two horses and drenched his shirt in a tincture of gaia berries, because he counted smearing them over his face again one indignity too far at this point in his career. When Arthur finally arrived Merlin handed the vial to him without thinking anything of it, though logically he couldn’t have prepared such a thing so quickly by natural means. This was not what Arthur took issue with.

“What is it?”

“Concentrated gaia berries, essentially. Put it on your shirt or something.”

“You made a _perfume_.”

Merlin scowled at him, hands on his hips. “You’re not serious.”

“It’s just one big rat,” Arthur groused. He pushed the vial back into Merlin’s hand. “What’s the point in disguising our smell if we’re just going to fight it anyways?”

It was in fact three big rats. Naturally, they smelled the two coming a mile away, and naturally they killed the horses, and naturally Arthur was disarmed with one still standing. He would kick himself for his poor grip strength later, but at that moment he was more concerned with the length of rats’ teeth. Merlin took a risk and dragged Excalibur into reach with magic, shutting his eyes tight and hoping the gold wouldn’t glow too bright in the dark. With no time to think he grabbed the hilt and stabbed the beast from behind before it ever knew he was there. Arthur kicked its limp head away with the tip of his boot and Merlin hefted the flat of the blade over his shoulder.

“You know what, you were right. Perfume was just too girly for a warrior like you.”

“Shut up, _Merlin_.”

Without the horses they were going to have to wait until Leon came and found them. Merlin knew it wouldn’t be long, since the man doubtless knew exactly what they had gone to do. They didn’t bother starting back, just laid the bloodied saddle blankets down in a hollow and started a fire. Arthur made Merlin take the first watch for his insolence. They were close enough to the Valley of the Kings that Merlin was cautious of the slight possibility of meeting highwaymen passing in the night, so he didn’t object.

Arthur quickly fell into an exhausted slumber. Merlin took a rag and wiped the rat blood from Excalibur, watching it flash in the firelight. The runes and the grooves between the fuller and the gold inlay greedily clung to the gore, but he still didn’t resort to magic to clean it, contemplating another run of the mill disaster averted by inches with this one weapon. He pressed his thumb into the groove separating gold and steel through the barrier of the dampened rag, thinking about destiny.

“You and I are exactly the same,” Merlin murmured. “We were born to protect him.” He looked over at Arthur, noting the slow rise and fall of his chest and feeling secure in it. “And he doesn’t even know the half of it.”

This was dangerous talk. Merlin didn’t care. There was always a part of him that wanted to be caught, just to have one bare moment in the uncompromised glory of knowing and being known before it all came crashing down, the way a comet desires to burn out forever for the sake of changing its color once.

“Four years ago, If you had told me I would serve the King of Camelot to my dying breath, I would have laughed in your face. I still might, if he’s been a git. They really couldn’t have chosen a more difficult person for me to care for,” he said. “But I do. That’s magic if I ever saw it.”

Arthur didn’t wake. He didn’t hear. He never did.

“Maybe you can’t relate. He has no problem showing how much he cares about _you_ ,” Merlin chuckled. And nothing happened.

Before those years, it had been in Freya’s possession again for another two. She had been a little more careless with it then, still fresh in the grief of her own life and angry at the forces that had made her into a monster. She resented its power—that magic would protect a deadly weapon and curse a girl who had only acted in self-defense. She hated Excalibur like a game hen hates a hawk, that all that strength couldn’t bother to go to someone who needed it. Whenever she looked on it, she only thought about how if she had had a tenth of its power her life could have been so different.

Freya lived almost the entirety of her life in a village on the Plains of Othanden, on the tiny hook of Mercian territory pincered between Escetir and Camelot. It was a bloody straight of land. While it hadn’t outright changed allegiance in her lifetime it had a long history of conquest and reconquest between the three powers. But people will endure much for the ground they stand on if it’s all they have to call their own, and the farmers and tradesmen who lived there opened their shutters every morning and ploughed their fields in every season, regardless of what flag came marching past. Growing up Freya had known multiple elders who were utterly convinced they lived in Escetir. The threat of violence was constant, but also poisonously normal.

Somehow, even when it happens on your own doorstep, you never expect it to happen to you.

In Freya’s nineteenth year, war passed over her home only for the sake of getting from one place to another. She had two brothers and a sister, and then she only had a sister. The night the regiment from Escetir arrived in full, the skies were red from burning and the water was black with ash. Her mother and father stood side by side in front of the door with an iron headed axe and a pitchfork that helped them none in the end. Freya kept an old, rusted out scythe in her belt and thought it would fall apart as soon as it would cut. But there was a man in the house and sounds she would be glad to forget, and when he came into the cellar where she hid, miracle of unholy miracles, she was the one who came out.

There was a letter in the breast of the soldier’s doublet from a mother who lived in the Forest of Geancy. When she realized she was the only survivor, Freya walked there on foot. She broke bread with the woman with trembling hands and spoke idly of the harsh winter. At the end of the night she revealed herself, and the woman bit on her sleeve and cried. It stirred something unnamable for Freya to know even a creature such as that man had someone who loved it. The woman asked if Freya would do differently now.

Freya though for half a moment of her mother and her father and her sister, and replied _yes_. If she had the chance, she would kill him before he ever stepped foot in the house. The woman cursed her until the end of her days. In the end, this was a brutally short curse.

In Avalon she was free of her bastet form unless she so willed, but instead she was imprisoned by the unbreakable chain of the waterfront and pressed into the service of an opaque future. She hadn’t accepted it, at first. It wasn’t until she saw Merlin’s face again that she felt compelled to take active part in the maintenance of destiny. She saw what he thought that power could do and hated it less. After that she found the sword where it had buried itself in the silt of the lakebed and cleaned it off, storing it safely on a rack in the halls she now called home.

Before that it passed briefly in and out of Uther’s hands after Merlin first forged it in Kilgharrah’s flame, and before that Tom Smith hammered the blade out of a lump of steel with the care of long rehearsed craft. Before even that it was nothing but a richness of mineral deep in the earth, unpracticed in holding any shape that meant something to the hands of men but fixed on an arrow’s path to storied greatness all the same. Anyone who laid eyes on it recognized on some guttural human level what made it this way. That weapon was pure love.

But none of this answers the question. Why did the lady sharpen the sword? She held it in her hands and felt the balance of it, turning it to and fro. _Take me up_ inscribed on one side, _cast me away_ on the other. It had indeed been taken up and cast away many times in its short history, for not too many reasons. A nightbird called—they were all nightbirds here. She stared into the clear horizon and understood something that had been brewing since she saw the mist lift and took the sword down from the rack. Why did she sharpen the sword?

Because someone was going to need it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lyric highlight, 'Love Love Love': "Some things you'll do for money, and some you'll do for fun/ but the things you do for love are going to come back to you one by one"


	5. Canto iv: Euminedes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canto iv soundtrack:  
> 人と異教の神々 - Yuji Yoshino  
> 愛について – Agape – Taro Umebayashi  
> A Swan Song (For Nina) – Clint Mansell  
> Careful – Samuel Sim  
> Chaos, the Mother – Austin Wintory  
> The Sixth Station – Joe Hisaishi  
> I Know It’s Over – The Smiths

Merlin and Taliesin stood alone in the stone vestibule. The limestone walls bowed outwards, ribbed with disturbingly organic ridges where the slow movement of water had been molding the sediment since time immemorial. As Taliesin lifted his lantern the darkness was shot through with the dazzling reflections of a splintered vein of a green precious stone. A staircase had been hewn from the natural floor, polished smooth by the passing of many footsteps. It led up by shallow steps and somewhere distant in the gloom terminated with a sudden switchback into an archway that gave way and spilled stale air over the tall wild grasses of the second terrace.

Merlin and Taliesin did not speak as they ascended this passage. Merlin carried an aura about him that harkened to the subtle changes in pressure that provoke songbirds to flee to higher ground, and the poet was nothing if not a songbird. Taliesin did not ask the significance of his brief, whetted exchange with Morgana and Merlin offered no explanation. However, Taliesin was doubtless curious.

Borne up from the stone; once again, the stars. Merlin had not studied the stars but still felt the sheer lucre of them was more than could be natural. The tall grass rippled in long silver waves that swept out to the cliff’s edge and broke against straggling apple trees. Through the middle of this expanse a path ran parallel to the cliff face, deeply marked with wagon-wheel ruts that overturned egg-round stones and nurtured beds of mud.

Merlin looked up and down the road, following its curve until each bent behind the rockface behind them. There was no particular significance to either direction, both uniformly peaceful and empty. He was saved the decision by a sound that he first discounted as the rushing of grass. But it came again, higher and clearer with every passing moment: the light voices of bells.

He watched the extinction point of the road, under that corner of the sky where the sun refused to rise. Around the bend there came—a rat.1

Merlin blinked. One could scarcely deny that the figure was a rat. Its round curved ears swept above the crown of a grey furry head, its nose was long and pointed and decorated with drooping whiskers, and it had a bare, pink tail that whipped and thumped in the dirt. Only, it was carrying a cow-bell in one hand and whacking it with a heavy stick with the other, and it wore a red patched cap and tunic, and notably, it was as tall as a man.

Taliesin clapped with joy. “I almost thought we missed it!”

The rat was crying. They weren’t tears of mourning—it sniffed pridefully and kept its head high, banging its bell all the while. A woman of late middle age appeared around the corner next and laid a hand on its shoulder, smiling gently. Behind her a short and spritely looking man came slinking at a distance, chewing on a pipe that puffed blue smoke, and behind him a trio of yellow-haired maidens with hawthorn flowers2 in their livery and hooves below their skirts shook belts affixed with small silver bells and tittered amongst themselves. A woman in the prime of her life with an unusual silver cap over her plaited silver hair dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, stopping to say something to someone just on the cusp of visibility.

The figure came into sight, and Merlin realized it was the one who rolled up the mist. She was adorned more elaborately now, with a crown of alder leaves gracing her head and a braided leather band crossways over her doublet. Bringing up the rear of the procession was an ornate litter that was draped in textile so fine it was nearly translucent, trimmed with bells, carried by two men who appeared to have lost possession of their heads.

“What?” Merlin asked, generally applying the question to the scene at large.

“Nothing brings us together like weddings and funerals,” Taliesin replied. “And traveler, there are very few funerals on the immortal isle.”

Merlin wanted to ask more, but Taliesin was already running to meet the procession. The sorcerer gave a beleaguered sigh as he fell into a half-hearted jog to keep up.

Taliesin stopped in front of the one who rolled up the mist, pacing backwards as he addressed her. “My lord. Great blessings and felicitations from my house to yours.” The one who rolled up the mist looked thoroughly unimpressed, but the silver-haired woman clasped her hands together with pride and shoved a blossoming hawthorn branch at him. Taliesin broke it down the middle and handed half to Merlin, who took held it gingerly in both hands, unsure of its purpose.

“Taliesin! I’m glad—oh I’m just so glad!” the silver woman giggled. Her eyes changed color as she moved them about. She seemed to notice Merlin for the first time, and smiled. “Ah! And who are you, dear?”

Merlin quick to remember what Taliesin had said about names. “No one. Just a traveler.”

“Well you must come—you absolutely must come and celebrate! My own child! I can scarcely believe it!” She brought out the handkerchief anew and dabbed at her misty, color-shifting eyes, gazing fondly at the one who rolled up the mist.

Taliesin discretely rolled his eyes. Merlin had to reassess the situation—he had assumed the one who rolled up the mist was an officiant or other esteemed guest, not the bride. He tried to sneak a subtle glance at the litter, and through the gossamer shroud glimpsed the shape of a woman he instantly recognized as the Lamia. She wore a shawl of grey feathers, with her hair twisted up with the tiny shells of lily of the valley.

Merlin waited to fall a few paces back from the silver-haired woman. “Is that a snake monster, or just someone who looks exactly like a snake monster?” He nodded towards the litter.

“The latter. She is sometimes called the teardrop of beauty. Wonderful woman. She once horsewhipped a man so badly he couldn’t walk for a year.”3

Merlin glanced again at the slight woman in the box. He supposed he shouldn’t let looks deceive him; the Lamia had been just as powerful. “I almost mistook her for the bride, with the flowers and…such.”

Taliesin looked at him strangely. “She is the bride.”

Merlin reassessed his reassessment. He supposed the silver woman hadn’t actually said the one who rolled up the mist was the bride. “Who’s the groom?”

The furrow in Taliesin’s brow was fast becoming a trench. “Groom? There’s no groom.”

Merlin gave a startled laugh and immediately ducked his head when the hooved maidens peered back at him curiously. “Is she getting married alone?”

Taliesin’s face resolved and he nodded slowly to himself, understanding something he wasn’t inclined to share. He clapped Merlin on the arm. “Wait and see, friend.”

Merlin scowled. Taliesin spotted some other acquaintance and flitted off before he could say a word, leaving him to walk alone. The hawthorn branch brushed against his knee as he walked, scattering ripe petals that held to their moorings only out of force of habit, which now abandoned the beauty of complete form to try and become something different, even if that was mud. The bells chimed with every step of the procession, causing small animals to upstart and flee where they slept low in the brush. The rhythm of walking was easy and solid, its own kind of meditation.

As they turned around the great arc of the cliff face, the carved towers Merlin had seen from the boat began to pick themselves out from the rock, just as the grassland began to die down. Elaborate facades as tall as some of the towers of Camelot were fashioned from the natural stone wall, segmented by rows of narrow windows, which occasionally showed stray candles left burning. Merlin marveled passively at the architectural majesty of it: the mathematical planning, the endless work of uniquely skilled hands. There was something to be said for craft.4

Ahead of him, the pipe-smoking man had been walking at such a lagging pace that over the course of minutes he had come closer and closer to falling in step with Merlin, and, as inevitably as the submission of a ripe apple to gravity, finally did so. The man glanced at him sideways with only his eyes, which were slyly disguised under his hair. Merlin felt vaguely that he recognized him, but couldn’t be sure. Life at court had been an eternally rotating memory game of unmemorable faces, and life at great destiny had been just as full of strangers. It was highly probable that he had met all these faces before, only for them to pass by making no mark on his mind.

He was on the verge of wondering what the others saw when the man spoke. “Haven’t seen you around.”

It wasn’t accusatory. Merlin looked at the man again. He carried himself with the lean of a man who didn’t much care when he arrived, so long as he did arrive. His thumbs were folded in his trouser pockets, and as he met Merlin’s eyes he smiled the kind of easy smile that made fathers keep pitchforks close at hand, and it so transformed his otherwise unremarkable face that the whole of him suddenly became unbearably charming.

“Uh,” Merlin flubbed, “ ‘m not from around here.”

It was an utterly dull thing to say, but the man didn’t seem to mind. “Good there’s someone interesting here, I might have died of boredom. Do you like these things, er… what is your name?”

Merlin’s eyes narrowed. “Lately I’ve been getting called traveler. People don’t seem inclined to stop.”

The man grinned sheepishly, not at all sore to be caught out at whatever trick that had been. “Fair enough. People will do that. I’ve been begging them for years to quit what they call me, all the good it’s done.”

“And what’s that?”

“I couldn’t possibly.”

Merlin smiled a little in spite of himself. “Come off it.”

“If you absolutely have to know…”

“Oh, I think I do.”

Another abashed, wide open smile. “For longer than I care to remember the otherwise good and generous people of my homeland have been very injuriously calling me love-talker.”

Merlin realized with a start that he was being flirted with. It was not the first time he had come late to the realization. Generally he saw and understood much more than he ever let on, but anything relating to his own person was infinitely harder to judge, though he also admittedly had blinders on around the subject of affairs of the heart. Merlin had long ago accepted his own love was like the sun: it put the warmth in his life, but would be forever untouchable. And while he never particularly intended to eschew potential connection outside of that, his devotion to Arthur so eclipsed his days that any fleeting moments he felt he might pursue something were so few and far between that he sometimes felt he may as well have given up and taken monastic vows. Now of all times he was firmly uninterested. For the first time he wish he had some articulate claim to the emotions he had been so content to hide, that he could take part in some signification of his mourning like a widow wears a veil, so that others might see and understand.

The hawthorn branch was bare now, and Merlin plucked a stem of honeysuckle from the roadside to replace it. He had been silent for too long. The love-talker looked at him bemusedly, then softened and made a face of pitying understanding that reminded Merlin of Gwaine. “I warned you it was terrible. If you have any mercy, forget it entirely.”

He patted Merlin on the shoulder and stopped to wait for the litter. Merlin figured this was what a gentleman was.

They came to the town square. It was paved in a similar style to the main courtyard of Camelot, and a few free standing buildings were delineated from the mountain. At the far end it was bordered by a river that ran from the pooling of a waterfall, spanned by a mossy stone bridge. The guests began to split off, milling about the square in loose congregations as more faces appeared from the various mismatched doorways bearing large dishes of rich foods.

All at once Merlin realized what face the love-talker wore and internally recoiled. It was Cedric, the vessel of Cornelius Sigan. How he had found that face charming for even an instant completely eluded him. He swore it must have been magic.

Taliesin reappeared at Merlin’s side holding a slice of bread piled with smoked fish and cheese.

“How do you keep doing that?” Merlin asked.

“Doing what?”

“Disappearing when it’s convenient for you.”

“You sound like—hold on, it’s starting.”

As Taliesin spoke a distant but strong tune was carried down on the wind. Merlin looked but couldn’t find the source; it came from above, like the gods themselves had felt a passing fancy and joined together in chorus.

The one who rolled up the mist stepped onto the bridge. The headless bearers of the litter brought their burden abreast of the riverside and lowered it onto the pavement before neatly removing their work gloves and tucking them into their belts. The whisper-thin curtains parted with a hollow jingle and the teardrop of beauty emerged and stood up, trailing a cape of finely woven lace around her. It became clear that her shawl was no shawl at all—silver and dawn-grey feathers grew from her very skin, lying flat and close along the bones of her shoulders and shifting with the movement of her muscles. This unusual feature was proudly displayed by the low sleeves of her pale blue dress. In a few liquid steps she joined the one who rolled up the mist on the bridge, and the two clasped hands.

The metaphorical click of the pieces falling into place in Merlin’s head was practically audible. He opened his mouth and closed it again before he could say anything.

Merlin didn’t know this, but this wasn’t the couple’s first wedding. When people have an immortal life together, limiting oneself to one wedding eventually starts to seem like a waste. The one who rolled up the mist and the teardrop of beauty had lost count of their various ceremonies and the particular whims that drove them to them at one season or another. On this occasion the two were rejoining after a long separation. The one who rolled up the mist had abandoned her wife a few odd decades ago for a reason she could no longer remember, and the teardrop of beauty was unfaithful to her wife with a mortal who was long since dead. However, since that time, somewhere a certain cosmic ray had passed through a particular celestial body and yearning had come to outweigh hurt, and so the two were drawn together again as implacably as the coming of spring after winter. They autopsied the burden of their pain, made amends, and courted for another decade or two. Thus they arrived at this day.

It has sometimes been posited that if every mortal weren’t straining under the limitation of our finite lives, we could see enough and learn enough that we might all earn the chance to become worth forgiving. The lovers weren’t proof, but they were maybe an argument.

For his part, Merlin was staggered by the simplicity with which they bared their affections. With his one great love he had never progressed far enough down a line of thought to even want such a thing. The most blatant display of his devotion was written unreadable in the efficient movements of his hands buckling armor secure enough to bring his king home again. Any words that started to cut too close to the truth were quickly diverted to teasing, because what did it matter? Magic held him in the doorway of his own life. He himself was not free to give. Some people wore love on their faces, or shared it in their hearts; Merlin kept it in his hands and kept his hands busy. It was more than enough to be born to serve Arthur, without wanting…

Something like this.

There was nothing wrong with wanting less, the same as there was nothing wrong with wanting more. He did not begrudge ambition and did not question his own contentment. All the same, he was struck with dread as some unconscious part of his thinking verged on the realization that humility in excess is pride’s grotesque twin. To deny oneself, to let oneself be crushed under the heel of life, to suffer silently for the promise of a distant and meager peace—these actions were lauded as virtues, and yet they drew blood all the same. Merlin had curbed his hunger for living and been modest of what he asked of love, because his actions would be repaid to him by the coming of the golden age, by the long keeping of his rightful place by Arthur’s side, or else a long life for Arthur to become the man Merlin already knew he was. As long as that were true he could happily make himself low as a snake, throw away his life like foreign coins, and never ask for more.

But it wasn’t true. And that meant that there had been no point to not wanting. The perceived valor in self-deprivation evaporated in an instant, and as he watched the women join hands, for the first time Merlin was envious.

Just out of his line of sight, Taliesin was watching him keenly.

The one who rolled up the mist cleared her throat in a gesture her most familiar friends might recognize as nervous. “Honored guests, please accept the food and wine from my table as my thanks for your support of this marriage. I am more inclined to action than words. I love this woman, and I wish to share my life with her. I would say it’s not just that that is all there is to it—that is all there is.”

The teardrop of beauty bobbed up on her toes in a gesture her most familiar friends might recognize as zeal verging on hubris. “I have known you longer than the oldest tree has lived, and I am still fascinated. For me, I think that might be what love is. I tried to understand you for so long that I had to come to love you instead. All I ask is another few lifetimes of scientific inquiry, that I might continue to fail to learn you completely and love you harder for it.”

Taliesin chewed loudly. His eyes were too calculating, but Merlin hardly noticed. “Do you cry at weddings? I don’t, but you seem like the type.”

Merlin’s jaw firmed. The corner of Taliesin’s mouth ticked up.

The teardrop of beauty bent her head and blew upon the couple’s joined hands, and at once a sprout of ivy laced from between their fingers5. It spread rapidly over their hands and twined up their arms, curling tighter by degrees until it appeared to sink beneath the skin, leaving a madder-red line twisting from wrist to elbow. They smiled, pressing their foreheads together.

“I don’t mean anything by it, just, sensitive type like you, you probably broke your fair share of hearts. Must bring up memories and all,” Taliesin whispered.

“Quiet,” Merlin muttered.

“Ah,” Taliesin crooned, “There it is. You _do_ have a story. Is it good? I should be taking notes.”

“Taliesin.” The air crackled with electricity. A few heads turned without knowing why they were looking. Merlin was still strung tight as a bowstring from Morgana, from Camlann, from years of always moving and never stopping. “I’m warning you.”

“Though, what with you being here doing this,” he put his thumb to his lip. “I guess it didn’t end well.”

**“Shut _up_!”**

Over the roar of his voice, thunder broke like glass and lightning slammed against the shell of the earth with the noise of a thousand frenzied hooves, blindingly close to their faces. Merlin saw white and didn’t stop seeing white as he heard a din of voices in chaos rise above the ringing in his ears.

“…What on earth...”

“…Ruined!”

“…Who is that? Who is that?!”

His vision returned by degrees, colors filling in dull and wrong but settling themselves more and more, quickly resolving into a crowd of disturbed faces, all turned towards him. Some were fearful—others were enraged. A black scorch mark a was etched into the pavement before them.

The woman with the silver cap stormed forwards. “How dare you? On my daughter’s wedding! A sacred, peaceful day! A unique, perfect day and you’ve blasted it all to pieces!”

“Not _that_ unique,” Taliesin mumbled.

She turned on him with a fury. “You—I expect more from you! Who does he think he is! Who do you think you are?” Her eyes fluctuated wildly as she glared into Merlin’s face. “…What are you?!”

Merlin tried to speak but had no reply. A voice came from the crowd.

“I know who that is. My gods! I know who that is!”

The older woman who walked with the rat pushed her way to the front of the crowd, stretching out one finger in his direction. Seeing her clearly now, Merlin felt the pit of his stomach drop out. The shape of her face belonged to Finna, the druid who had sacrificed her life because she believed Emrys would be the salvation of magic-kind. But it was not a perfect copy like the others. The space where Finna had eyes was scarred over with a lattice of tissue like tree-roots. It was a feature Merlin had only seen in one other creature: the Dochraid.

This new stranger of patchwork familiar faces fairly trembled to see him. “That’s the one who did kill my sister. That is Emrys.”6

He was, and he had. Merlin tried to conceive of how little time had passed since he had intimidated the Dochraid into informing on Morgana, and then ran her through with Excalibur when she attempted to retaliate. It had been a month at most, but it felt like a lifetime. Murmurs rose again from the crowd.

“My own brother Aulfric!” the rat squealed. “Emrys killed Aulfric and Sophia!”

“My Grunhilda!”

“The elder!”

Merlin felt a terrible pressure constricting his ribs, like his body had been put in a vice. Each name rung with horrible clarity. He remembered the faces, but they were otherwise terrifyingly unmemorable in the greater sea of violent moments that had become routine to his life. The changeling plot had come during his third year at Camelot; by then it was almost normal.

The one who rolled up the mist stepped forward, her hand on her sword. “Traveler. Even if I liked you, I could not let this disturbance stand. It bodes poorly for my union. Between you and I…” She drew her sword and held it two-handed in front of her. “You should start running.”

She did not seem like a woman to argue with.

Merlin tripped over his feet stumbling backwards and away, trying to make for the bridge. If he turned and bolted he risked being stabbed in the back with no way of defending himself, but as it was he was moving blindly. He was immensely grateful to feel the incline of the bridge pick up under his feet, even as the one who rolled up the mist took an enormous swing that cleaved through the loose fabric of his tunic without so much as a snag.

He looked frantically for Taliesin, but the man was—of course—nowhere to be found. Behind the disgruntled bride, a mob of Sidhe and creatures of magic cheered and goaded her on, ready to take his fate into their own hands if necessary. Another swing clipped his shoulder like a line of pure fire, and he gritted his teeth, desperate to just get _away_.

He reached the other bank. The villagers were caught in a bottleneck by the narrowness of the bridge, and the wilderness would provide cover if he could just move fast enough. He turned, ready to sprint.

His foot lodged into a tree root and he fell hard on his forearms.

Merlin twisted over himself as fast as he could, throwing up his hands in front of his face. Magic welled up in his veins on instinct, but in a moment somewhere between inspiration and fatal distraction he remembered everything Morgana had told him. If he lashed out with elemental magic, there would certainly be more dead. But if he could control his magic to transfigure his body to become a bird or a hart or anything faster than a person, there was still a chance of escape. He tried to concentrate, to remember the blasted wheels that he had never studied properly, to counterrotate whatever was equal and opposite to his position from whatever he was aiming for, whatever that meant.

_Which way am I going? Towards body? Body is aligned with Earth. Towards Earth—away from Earth? No, towards. Shit. Shit!_

He channeled Earth, counterrotated, and instantly knew he had made a mistake. What came to hand was Birth, and in response a thicket of new vines sprung up and wove itself into a protective net that at least stopped the sword from falling straight through his chest. The swordswoman didn’t falter. She released the grip of the sword and pushed both of her hands outwards in a gesture of clear magical intent, and Merlin felt his back push hard into the ground until it started to give way, swallowing his arms and legs and sucking him down. The dust was in his eyes, his mouth—

When Merlin was a young child, he ate charcoal.

Many people have stories from their early youth of grabbing something inedible and putting it in their mouth, to the panic of mothers and consternation of physicians everywhere. This was not that. Between the ages of three and six Merlin ate a block of charcoal the size of a fist exactly once per week. If he was lucky it would be given to him soaked in honey, but more often he ate it plain, and while it certainly wasn’t pleasant, he couldn’t really remember a time before his Sunday dinner was the preclude to an arduous battle to stuff a not insignificant amount of char down his throat. Hunith found it helped with his ‘fits’.

In later years, Merlin often wondered why it was the charcoal that worked. Plenty of other ‘remedies’ had not been so lucky. Merlin had no memory of it, but apparently he had spent three months walking with mistletoe in his socks to no effect. He theorized that it was because any magical properties of charcoal would likely fall between earth and fire, which made it the exact opposite of his bearing, but even after years of study one could never be certain about magic. At the time he didn’t even know the _word_ magic—Hunith called it his sparkles. If he knew the word then there was still a chance he could say something importune, though to who Merlin knew not, as until he was five Merlin’s mother was the only person he had ever seen.

He never asked why hiding his sparkles was so important that it was worth filling his mouth with ash, but as he grew older Hunith told him anyways.

“There are people who will want to hurt you. This will be difficult in the moment, but if anyone were to discover—the danger will be for a lifetime. Please darling, just eat.”

It would be almost poetic if his life were bookended by choking on dust because of how much strangers wanted him to die. 

* * *

“That’s not possible.” Arthur’s heart pounded, which he felt was unfair for a dead man. He didn’t have a heart, so why should it pound? For what did it pound? For a traitor, a man who caused the deaths of scores upon scores of his people? Could that really be?

“I’m sorry,” Ygraine murmured. She knew this was the one unforgivable thing. The Great Dragon was responsible for many painful deaths of the people Arthur was directly responsible for. Personal betrayal would certainly sting Arthur, especially with his history, but to betray Camelot and cause her harm struck at the core that his entire being had been molded around. It was the ultimate tragedy of his kingship: there would be Camelot after King Arthur, but there was no Arthur without Camelot.

Ygraine extinguished the last of the vapor rising off the cauldron with a wave. Arthur fixated on that, his mind still trying to catch up to the information it was receiving.

“You use magic so freely,” he said.

She seemed to understand his tone. “Fear of magic is a recent invention. More recent than I, anyhow.”

Arthur questioned the veracity of that. He didn’t know much of magic. He didn’t know what it was born of, what end it served, or how anything was capable of so much horror and wonder by the workings of spare herbs and unintelligible mumblings. He didn’t understand its logic and didn’t claim to, and if he ever wanted to understand he knew that was never within the realm of possibility. (He also admitted to himself he could easily have said these same things of Merlin.) But magic was ultimately power, and power would always sow fear. It showed in their histories; Escetir had persecuted sorcerers by means other than the law long before Camelot’s Great Purge.

However, the implications of this thought on his own life chilled the blood too thoroughly to be accepted. Reexamining the issue in his mind, he wondered if fear and power were so inseparably married. There were powers that afforded security, even trust. But even if this were true, it struck him as a false comfort. He didn’t understand—it seemed like the great disasters of his life were actually characterized by unfounding his understanding, of family or loyalty or justice. But for once he was in a position to get answers.

“Are you a sorceress?” He asked plainly.

“No, but there’s more variation in life than sorcerers and the truly magicless. You yourself are proof of that.”

Arthur bristled. “I have no doings with magic.”

“Yet it made you. You are magic’s child.”

Arthur stopped, struck dumb by her words. _Merlin lied. Morgause was telling the truth. My father was guilty of that black deed I was willing to kill him for._

She laid a hand on his arm. “But this isn’t about magic, is it.”

“I don’t believe it.” After all, it was the one unforgivable thing. His instincts were screaming at him that this was the end of all trust, all loyalty, but he clung fast to the last scrap of belief, for no other reason than he wasn’t ready to resign Merlin to be his worst regret forever in his memory. In his own estimation Arthur didn’t believe he engendered any kind of lasting loyalty beyond rallying the troops in a time of need, but Merlin was different to anyone. Merlin had been unswerving by his side for longer than many of his knights had been at court. He had protected Arthur for all that time and asked no reward, when to anyone of note the point of Arthur’s life was always his political value. Merlin had to remain different to anyone just for one more moment—and when that moment passed, the moment after that. He found he couldn’t let that inexplicable exceptionalism go.

Ygraine rested her chin on her hand, trying to sort him out. “Why does he matter so much to you? I’m sure you wouldn’t extend this much faith to anyone else.”

Arthur stared at the tabletop with its varied swirls and knots. He twisted his ring unconsciously, trying to put it into words. “I don’t know if I can say.”

“I’m your mother, Arthur, you can say anything.”

He didn’t know if he could say it was harder to reason through these things than to speak them, so he tried. “I don’t know. When we met I was still an uncrowned, untested prince. After that my life became leagues more difficult every day, but it was easier to bear, somehow. Even when we didn’t get along at all… My life became somehow fundamentally gorgeous when he entered it. His being there made my halcyon days. It’s not something you forget.”

Arthur was amazed he had gotten through this speech without dissolving into incomprehensible stuttering. Ygraine reached out and gently brushed a forelock of hair away from his brow, and he felt very young. “My,” she said with surprise, “how he _dulled_ you.”

Arthur became very still. “—What?”

“As a prince, there was always the hint of cunning to you, a certain perceptiveness hidden under the compliant mask. There was the sense that you were always thinking more than you said. It appears Merlin didn’t clear the way for you to speak your mind as much as he made it so that you didn’t need to think. Hard choices evaporated around him, I imagine.”

Arthur wanted to deny it, but Merlin’s own words came back to him. ‘ _I didn’t want to put you in that position_.’ He remembered Merlin apparently lying outright to stop Arthur from killing his own father. The not small part of him that had hoped for Ygraine’s approval smarted fiercely. Her words cut too close to every deep held insecurity he had nursed in his life.

“My boy, you are _smart_ ,” she said. “You think tactically, and you have a rare gift for examining problems from multiple perspectives. It would be more natural if you had suspected him, but he intentionally made himself a blind spot. If you had thought too much, you would have known to fear him.”

“Fear.” Arthur laughed bitterly. “The day I fear Merlin is…” He stopped. _What? The day I die? The day I turn over my crown? Do I have anything worth losing anymore?_

Ygraine’s lip firmed. She seemed—not disappointed in him, but gravely concerned for the poverty of his prospect. Her hands folded carefully in her lap as she considered. “If you’re still worried about him, why don’t we see where he is now?”

Arthur couldn’t believe that was an option. She stood up, indicating to the cauldron. He came to her side with only a moment of hesitation, sure that if he could just see Merlin’s face things would become certain again.

* * *

Being interred alive has several deadly effects on the body. Chief among them is suffocation, though crushing force is a close second. Merlin hadn’t known that he didn’t need to breathe until he no longer had the option.

The weight of several tons of soil became passably forgettable surprisingly quickly. Then again, Merlin’s pain threshold had become abnormally high over the years. His lungs burned until the moment it became unbearable, at which point they kindly realized they didn’t actually need the air they were screaming for. The dark was total. It was a death of everything but the mind.

He wondered how long it would take for him to lose his reason, trapped like this. In the moment it was almost peaceful. Life had been trying to buck him off for so long that his immortality seemed like a bad joke—part of him wished more than anything to take the reprieve for what is was and rest. But in the end, no. He was still beholden.

Merlin ripped magic from the earth like a root sucks in water, feeling the lightness of it in his spine, tasting electricity on the back of his tongue. Aboveground, the wind began to whip down on the flanks of wild grain. The dispersing wedding party stopped and looked at the sky, smelling rain where there wasn’t rain before. In a flash a bolt of lightning split apart the sky and peeled the earth open like an overripe fruit, and where the fresh-turned grave had been the dirt yawned wide as mouth of Hades itself. Merlin pushed himself up and stood on the ridge of it, ribbons of wind curling around his limbs, eyes afire with gold. The grasslands rippled in crashing waves, and an old oak tree came up by the roots and was lashed flat against the ground.

A single point of hail pinged off the one who rolled up the mist’s sword. She looked down and the tiny puck of ice had made a visible scar in the steel. The seasoned fighter appraised the situation with remarkable efficiency and came to the conclusion that this fight would be pyrrhic at the very best. Sheathing her sword, she stepped towards Merlin with her hands outspread.

“Peace!”

He didn’t hear her over the roaring of the sky. The villagers were fleeing, and he watched their retreating backs as though it were happening in a painting. Rain slashed down in burdensome whips and pocked the dirt with dark wetted streaks. Lightning slung from one black cloud to another, low enough that it raised the hairs on the woman’s arms.

“Peace! We didn’t know!”

“What?” Merlin bit, sardonic. “That I had power enough to kill you?”

“Yes!” she shouted. “We mistook your reticence for weakness, and the weak can be punished. But not power. We defer to your strength.”

Merlin laughed hollowly. “You say the kindest things.”

She frowned and he was suddenly overcome with exhaustion. He focused and tried to reel back the overflow of storm. It was more difficult than it had been in years, but it was still his element to control. The gale deadened to an eerie calm, and the sky cleared. The felled oak tree remained, its roots reaching skyward in a sea of broken grass.

The one who rolled up the mist nodded. “Your mercy incurs a debt. You would be kind to let us pay it upfront. What can we do for you?”

Merlin hesitated. “Passage. I’m going to the castle.”

Her eyes widened, but she smoothed her face into neutrality just as quickly. “We will show you the way to the next terrace.”

 _And be rid of you_ , Merlin thought. They crossed the bridge back to the town square, where he found Taliesin sheltering in a doorway. The poet shook out his wet greatcoat and glared balefully at Merlin, and the swordswoman glared balefully at Taliesin in turn. The poet stepped aside and the one who rolled up the mist produced the key to the door from her belt.

The tower the door was attached to was rounded, protruding from the cliffside with a footprint in the shape of a half-moon, bounding enough room for a spacious but solitary chamber. When the door gave way a fair few fair folk who had taken sanctuary within froze at the sight of Merlin’s face, pressing together protectively. Merlin saw this and became so ashamed of himself that he felt physically sick, and brushed past them as quickly as he could, thinking it would be better if they didn’t have to look upon him anymore. He ascended the curved staircase set into the back wall without once looking back, though he could hear Taliesin’s footsteps behind him.

The second floor was blessedly empty. A babbling fountain had been carved out of the rock, feeding a miniature aqueduct that ran around the circumference of the room. Merlin wasn’t presently paying close attention to where he put his feet and narrowly avoided soaking his boots.

“They’re afraid of you,” Taliesin said casually, unhooking a waterskin from his belt and filling it from the fount.

Merlin looked at his hands and tried to conceive of them. “Maybe they should be. Maybe I’ve been going about it all wrong—maybe I should have been keeping people away.” As he said it, he remembered the taste of charcoal so distinctly he couldn’t separate it from reality. He remembered the years of his early childhood, before he had ever met another human being who wasn’t his mother, when they had lived alone in the woods where no one could know them because that was what was safe.

Taliesin capped his waterskin and looked at him through one eye, tapping a finger against his belt.

“I’m sorry,” Merlin said. “Believe it or not I’m not usually like this.”

Taliesin huffed a laugh. “What are you usually? A lighthearted imp?”

“More or less.”

Merlin rounded to the next staircase, noting a lag before Taliesin followed. The third floor was a private bedchamber, and he passed through without lingering out of respect for privacy. There was another bedchamber, and then a sitting room, and in the ceiling of the sitting room there was a wooden hatch that opened onto the roof, which came out exactly level with the clifftop. The two emerged there and met the brisk air where it blew down unfettered. Merlin stood and faced the parapet of the roof where it looked out to the water, straining to see a far shore and failing. Then he turned and faced the twisting wood, where he knew his duty was waiting.

“Arthur?”

It felt to Arthur like he had been in this room for a long time. Without the sky, it was hard to be sure.

“Oh, Arthur.”

Power breeds fear.

Whatever the profound nature of power, the people in the vision had seen it in Merlin and feared him for it. Arthur himself had seen it—it was one thing to hear Gaius call Merlin the most powerful sorcerer to walk the earth, and another to actually watch him rend the heavens apart on a whim. Arthur recalled the flash of lightning that cracked open the ground and measured it against the boyish smile of the man he would call his best friend in the early light of the stables with straw still clinging to his hair, and he wondered if humans had been fooling themselves the whole time they had trifled with inventing language, since after all it seemed that meaning wasn’t actually related to anything.

“I’m so sorry. It’s a hard fate to know what someone is capable of.”

Yes, ability was the real wormwood of the thing. Arthur had been so sure if he could just see Merlin’s face again, he would know instantly that it was beyond his ability to do something so catastrophic as free the Great Dragon. Instead he got proof that there was very little that Merlin was incapable of. This was a side of his friend he was never meant to see. The uncomplicated beauty of his memories had been leased to him on the secret condition of never knowing this face. In looking upon it now he had surely changed something essential.

It made sense. Arthur’s closest allies failed him at the last; that was the story of his life. The ones capable of hurting him most grievously would have to twist the knife eventually, just to prove the power they held over him was real. It would be easy for him to concede that Merlin was a sorcerer, just as bloodied and deceptive as any other. The king’s last earthly province was poised to flare out, leaving him finally untethered in the long night. It made too much sense.

On point of fact the truth spurns sense and refuses to resolve what it can complicate. There was a nagging thought in Arthur’s head that if Merlin were some grand villain, it would too cleanly vindicate Arthur’s own self-pity and allow him to remain too comfortable in his own convictions. Arthur did believe that he was skilled at examining a subject from different perspectives, and he recognized that the picture he had was well-framed but incomplete. With Merlin, there was always more.

“Where was that?”

Ygraine blinked. “What?”

“The place in the vision. Where was he?” Arthur asked. When Ygraine didn’t respond, he continued. “There was wheat growing, but the planting wasn’t according to any custom I recognize. And the swordswoman—she was in formal dress, but the style isn’t familiar to me. The stone looked like it could be from the southeast, and in any case it’s not native to the north of Camelot. I know my kingdom, and that wasn’t it.”

Ygraine reassessed him, drawing in a beath that delicately strained the muscles of her throat and releasing a heavy sigh. “I’m happy to tell you, but I think you ought to rest first. You’ve expended more energy than you know, and it grows late. Come with me.”

The folds of her dress slunk together as she turned to the door, not waiting for a reply, and Arthur was struck by a sudden alertness of the nerves that might have been called instinct, or impulse. As Ygraine attempted to lead him, she didn’t see him slip his hand into the cauldron. His fingers closed around a still bubbling nub of hazelnut.

* * *

Notes

1. Fairies appearing in the procession: Far Darrig – Irish origin, rat man wearing red. Merrow – Irish origin, mermaid equivalent who wears a magical hat to travel between land and sea. Glaistig – Scottish origin, half woman half goat, often with long yellow hair and a long green dress. Gancanagh – Irish origin, vaguely connected to the leprechaun and a seducer of men and women.

2. Hanakotoba of the day: Not hanakotoba, but hawthorn is associated with the sidhe, and alder and oak are sacred trees in celtic tradition. Lily of the valley - return of happiness. Honeysuckle – bonds of love, devotion, self-sacrificing love. Ivy – marriage bonds.

3. The teardrop of beauty and the one who rolled up the mist are loosely inspired by Fand and Manannàn mac Lir, but are not intended to represent them. But I absolutely couldn’t leave out Fand literally horsewhipping Cúchulainn for throwing a stone through her wings…..dare I say girlboss.

4. For visual reference, when I mentally designed this I was thinking of the Anasazi cliff dwellings, but upon googling it would be a lot closer to Petra, Jordan.

5. Handfasting via literally tying hands together is actually totally anachronistic, as handfast presumably comes from Old Norse handfesta, “to strike a bargain by joining hands.” But the show made the understandable decision that ‘let’s shake on it’ wasn’t quite the mood, so it’s canonical in-universe.

6. The Dochraid healed herself to send a message to Morgana in the episode, but we’re presuming she died directly afterwards because of the whole stabbed with Excalibur thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Assorted thoughts:  
> I’m the kind of gay who can’t tell when men are hot or not so I am just assuming Cedric looks like a regular dude.  
> Merlin’s tunic is at this point held together purely by magic probably.  
> If you’re not immortal do NOT get back together with your ex who did you wrong  
> “Why don’t you take interest in your Irish heritage the way you do with your Japanese side” misunderstood the prompt. Wrote 25k of bbc merlin fanfiction instead.  
> Yes Taliesin is basically eating a cream cheese and lox bagel.  
> Lyric highlight, ‘I Know It’s Over’ – This started as an ‘I can feel the earth falling over my head’ joke but then I relistened and oh my god. The entire song. But we’ll say “I know… cause tonight is just like any other night/ That’s why you’re on your own tonight/ With your triumphs and your charms/ While they’re in each other’s arms...”


	6. Canto v: Gilgamesh

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEY WE’RE BACK AT IT! Apologies for being m.i.a., I’m back at school and I’m working on a 60 page capstone project so things are going to be a bit slow.   
> Canto v soundtrack:  
> Annihilation of Pejite – Joe Hisaishi  
> Waterfall Cave – Darren Ang arrangement  
> Horizon – Samuel Sim  
> The Invasion of Kusharna – Joe Hisaishi  
> Nemesis – Carter Burwell  
> エピローグ – Joe Hisaishi  
> NFWMB – Hozier  
> Trigger warnings: this chapter is about violence and (talking heads voice) life during wartime, so expect to see a lot of trauma and violence. This is, imo, the darkest chapter, so it’s all up from here!

When the forest had enclosed him on either side, Merlin was overwhelmed with a sense of true wilderness. It was the vast and shrinking feeling of seeing the stars through ancient boughs and suddenly understanding that everything you had ever seen was less than a single lash on Nature’s eye. Everything that grew here grew by hooks and claws. The trees did not bear fruit here, the grass did not bloom with rich seeds, and not a single flower was growing anywhere. This was a forest that cared for mankind as much as a horse cares for a fly.

“I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me where I should be going,” Merlin hazarded.

Taliesin smirked. “I shall, just to spite you.” He pointed in a southwest direction Merlin still knew to be inland. “There’s a cave thereabouts that’ll take you up the next leg directly.”

Merlin suspected it wouldn’t be that simple, but regardless, the only way through was forward and the only way forward was through. He stepped carefully through the overgrowth of bramble obscuring the forest floor, but no matter which way he turned it seemed to find some way to snare him. The dark, sturdy trunks pressed closer as they walked, scattering the winking eyes of the stars into obscurity as their arms clung together. Merlin wondered if they had gained more altitude than he had initially supposed; the air felt thin and he breathed deeply to get his fill of it, letting his ribs expand to their limit and still feeling his lungs begin to ache.

All at once the forest gave way to a belt of clear sky. The vines and thornbushes still battled their way upwards knee-high, but across some invisible line the trees stopped their advance for about twenty paces, after which they sprung up again just as abruptly. It looked to be an abandoned highway. In this crude reclaimed meadow a handful of pùca were burrowing, themselves immune to the bite of thorns.

In the south, there came a rumbling of pounding hooves. If it were not a cloudless sky, it could just as easily have been mistaken for an oncoming storm.

The pùca started up in their dens, scrambling faster than their amorphous feet could carry them. Slinging their vague bodies upwards, the head drew away from the body in haste to move forwards and the legs elongated to leap further ahead, pulling themselves like dough into the shapes of does and stags that rose in a frenzied charge and disappeared into the underbrush. Merlin turned to ask Taliesin about this, only to see the man had thrust his hands over his ears.

A hound bayed.

The sound was tremendous, echoing from every direction so that the animal part of Merlin’s brain was certain the creature must be inches from his face, and it turned every inch of the air alive and electric. Merlin was arrested by the vague conviction that _something was wrong_. His lungs burned. He turned, and Taliesin had vanished. The hooves grew louder and louder, like they were running on the inside of his skull. Something was coming, but he didn’t know what. He realized he needed to move, to leave this place behind before he ever found out.

The hound barked a second time, causing the hair on his neck to stand on end and goosepimples to rise on his arms, and he balked. Moving was a foreign concept. He tried to remember what it was that he was doing, but his mind refused to stay focused for more than a second at a time before skittering off in twelve different directions. Without consciously knowing it, Merlin sank down to the ground and covered his neck with his hands, folding his head between his knees. He could taste the fear in his clenched throat, seizing up all of his limbs in one shock of paralyzing adrenaline. Space lost its axis as he felt the constriction of his own screaming skin cut off all sense of an outside world, tearing his sense of self down into abstracts that were fragile and tiny next to the unnamable something that was swallowing him and that was wrong. Fragmented ruins of logical thought coalesced and were decimated before coming to fruition, only leaving him with the impression that somehow, this was _familiar_.

The third bark came, and Merlin was lost.

* * *

Aside from Arthur that night in Ealdor, no one ever asked why Merlin came to Camelot. As a bright young country boy with a nose for trouble, people made assumptions that he didn’t correct. Why did anyone come to the city? Why did human beings gather together and build elaborate structures, if not for clean and innocent ambition? Truly, Merlin couldn’t say he didn’t have that spirit in him, even if he was following a much different guiding star. He was there because of magic, and he was there because of his mother’s love—he was there because of a wolf.

At age seventeen, Merlin was casually balancing on the line between the autumn of his boyhood and a the beginning of a slow, content life as another set of hands pulling together and pitching in to bring harvest from the earth. He did what he could for the household day to day, and when he touched living objects like the shells of eggs or the leaves of weeds he tried uselessly to ignore the arcane potential under his skin. He adamantly whispered to himself that it was perfectly adequate to never want anything more.

It had been two years since he had done magic involuntarily, and many more since it had gotten truly out of control. This life was poised to take him in as easily as snowmelt to ground. But in that summer Matthew came back from trapping with news of a wolf in the hills, and anyone with bodies sturdy enough rallied around the call to hunt it down. Will’s grandmother sat on a step and sharpened neighbors’ pitchforks into ugly points, and Merlin was filled with a sense of powerful dread.

“Why do we have to kill it?” Merlin asked his mother. “It hasn’t hurt anyone—we don’t know that it will _ever_ hurt anyone!”

“I know. It’s a terrible thing. But we can’t the both of us live, and that’s that.”

He asked to go with the hunting party, that the creature would have someone who understood. Hunith agreed uneasily and wondered if it was a mistake.

The night of the hunt was unpleasantly warm, and the rough wool of his tunic clung to his skin. Rag-bound torches passed up and down the crowd, and the light of them flickered from eye to eye in a way Merlin almost recognized from his reflection. A furrier led the way into the wood, chasing the signs he had learned from his trade far beyond where any human was wont to walk for long hours as the moon set. Merlin was beginning to hope that the beast would escape and pass on to the Forest of Geancy when he became aware of the familiarity of his surroundings.

This was what the local residents called the storming wood, though it hadn’t stormed in some time. It was also Merlin’s first home. Somewhere in the forest there was a twice abandoned cottage where Hunith had waited out the latter half of her pregnancy and painstakingly protected the first half of Merlin’s childhood. He had once known this place as thoroughly as the backs of his own eyelids, down to the roots under the ground. The reason they ever came to call it the storming wood was because of his own uncontrolled magic following the whims of a temperamental toddler.

Someone called out the sighting of a pawprint in the mud. Merlin braced himself against the shattering hope that the wolf would get away.

The hunters had no dogs, but themselves became the pack that tore on into the darkness after the hint of their quarry. Merlin straggled, unable to summon the vigor and enthusiasm to drive on like them. He was almost alone when a howl split the air and then sunk into an eerie whine. He put on speed then, and by the time he regained the mob the unseemly sight was already prepared.

The animal had caught its leg in a snare. Two farmers pinned it down with a net so it couldn’t squirm out of the way when the blade came down. It keened miserably and dug its claws into the mossy floor, and Merlin pressed a hand over his mouth to keep from crying out in answer. Two crossbow bolts were lodged in its shoulder—Merlin didn’t even know they had a crossbow. The bright eye rolled in all directions, searching the faces of its attackers, the paths of escape that were out of reach, and the oppressive brilliance of the stars. Then it landed on Merlin, and stopped.

The wolf recognized him. Maybe it simply instinctually registered the power he held, but maybe not. Against logic, it felt to Merlin that the wolf recognized itself in him, and he couldn’t help but see himself in it. _You are like me and I am like you._ This was what he had wanted—for this creature to have someone who knew what it meant to be hunted as a threat to decency and safety, so that it wouldn’t be alone. But he had not accounted for the fact that witnessing is a mutual act; neither was he alone, now, and neither could he escape the bloodshed.

His neighbor approached carefully with a pitchfork. Merlin felt time constrict like the lead of a mule that had just reared up to kick. Unable to look away, he stared into the dark face and gritted his teeth against a scream—as his spirit overflowed and every straining rope and wire snapped clean away.

The wolf lunged up and incidentally tore open the skin of his neighbor’s arm even as she startled back. Red blood dripped between its barking teeth as it loped away as fast as its limping leg could tolerate. People were yelling and running, but Merlin stood rooted, only distantly thinking of what his mother was going to say. And as it ascended the final ridge before it disappeared completely, the wolf stopped for a moment and turned its head, and with gleaming yellow eyes, it witnessed him.

* * *

When Merlin awoke, he was briefly unsure whether he was looking up or down. Logic said up, but the mesh of brambles he was looking at gave an at least half-hearted argument for down. But no, thin threads of light were filtering through the tangle, catching on motes of pollen as they drifted in and out of reach. A moth fluttered lazily from one branch to another.

He thought about sitting up, but decided it was a miserable idea. Every bone in his body felt as heavy as lead, and his internal organs were apparently still deciding how much they wanted to remain internal. This was likely at least partially a compounded effect from being buried alive. He tried to take stock—nothing seemed obviously broken. He was actually bleeding less than originally, seeing as someone had bandaged the sword wound on his arm that he had almost completely forgotten about.

_Which means_ , he noted, _someone has taken me in_. Which made sitting up sadly unavoidable.

When he did so, Merlin came face to face with his host. The two were enclosed in a small hollow woven into an otherwise impermeable thicket, and there simply wasn’t anywhere else to be. The stranger was easily as large as Percival, held a white pùca in their arms, and was nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding foliage. Leaves, lichen, and grass covered every inch of their body, disguising any distinguishing characteristics under a mat of green.1 They stopped petting the almost-rabbit to raise their hands and move them quickly.

_“Hello. Are you alright?”_

Merlin had one of the stranger experiences of his lifetime as his brain rearranged itself to interpret a language he should not be able to understand. He had all but forgotten his ramblings in the wilderness, but the memory came to him now, and he wondered if some part of his magic had found language too tedious and started cutting out the middle man. He tried to cover his internal panic with nonchalance, wrangling with whatever loose magic was tumbling around his brain.

“Quis es?2 Nope. Wrong one.” Merlin held his hands out in front of him, willing them to convey meaning.

“ _I can read lips as long as you’re facing me. What language was that?”_ they signed.

“I really don’t know.”

Though he couldn’t really see a face, Merlin got the sense he was being studied. He shrugged.

_“Who are you?”_ they asked.

Merlin laughed. “That’s what I was going to ask you.”

“ _I’m Ghillie. This is Lí_.” They bounced the pùca in their arms.

“Do you…This might sound odd, but do you know what happened to me?” Merlin asked.

Ghillie nodded. “ _You heard the Hounds of Avalon. Any mortal who hears them bark three times dies of fear on the spot._ ”3

Merlin slid his bootheel in the grass. “Still immortal, then.”

“ _You seem surprised_.”

“It’s new. Kind of. Where are we?”

Ghillie paused, pondering this. “ _Avalon. The third terrace, the King’s wood. West corner. Second favorite pùca hideout_.”

“You are so helpful. Why can’t everyone be like you?” Merlin breathed deeply, feeling marginally more in control of the situation. “There’s a king?”

Unexpectedly, Ghillie reached out and patted him on the head. “ _You must be really new. You’re practically a baby. There are four that call themselves the one true King of Avalon. The claim of each one is an insult to the other, so they’re stuck chasing each other in circles until there’s only one left. But each one can only be killed in a single strike, and they’re all so wrathful that even when they catch up with each other, one can’t hold back from beating the other again and again so that he has to live. This whole forest is fed by their hatred for each other. But even so we find a way to live here_.”4

Ghillie patted the pùca just as they had with Merlin. He tried to imagine living in a forest made of pure hate. The thorned walls around him didn’t feel particularly hateful. They felt like sanctuary.

“It must be difficult.”

“ _Not always, but often_.” Ghillie’s shoulders slumped as they looked blankly up at the woven ceiling. “ _I’m not the King of Avalon, so they don’t care about me if I stay out of their way, but the fear… it can be hard to live like that. And I miss the sunlight_.”

Merlin blinked. “I didn’t know there was a sun, here.”

“ _No night lasts forever_.”

“I still haven’t told you my name.”

“ _You don’t have to_.”

Merlin was starting to really like Ghillie.

Lí perked up, her vague ears twitching forwards. She leapt out of Ghillie’s arms and disappeared down a tunnel that wove itself into existence to let her pass. Ghillie briefly put their hands on their temples before diving after her, clearly in distress. On an impulse Merlin followed, not quite sure what he was doing but set on doing it.

The tunnel was small enough that he had to crawl on his hands and knees. A little mud was unavoidable, but he had had worse. More of a concern was where Ghillie had gone—they didn’t seem small enough to move through this passage very fast, but had somehow already gotten out of sight. Somewhere in the distance he heard a rattling, like a child’s toy.

Merlin scuttled out the other end and sat up on his knees. He had been spat out into more of the same dense underbrush, with just enough foot room for two strange animals to wrestle about. The pair were black as pitch, and thus almost indistinguishable in their tumbling. One was clearly rounder, with the ears of a pùca; the other was much larger, standing as high as a common cur. Yet when they broke apart, it was not a dog at all. A huge, spitting cat with a white blaze on its chest stood on the throat of the rabbit-like sprite, its claws flexing over the vital skin.5 Merlin stretched out his hand, unsure what to do.

Before he could decide, the bushes trembled and parted, and Ghillie appeared from the shadows waving a dead branch at the cat. It arched its back and leapt up on two legs, letting out a final wail before fleeing into the undergrowth.

The rescued prey stood up on shaking legs, and at once Merlin discerned that it was the source of the earlier rattling. Lí appeared from behind Ghillie’s leg and bounced over to her comrade, pressing her nose into its neck. The odd shape of the pùca was more apparent by comparison: it was swollen up like a fat gourd.

Ghillie waved for his attention. “ _Sorry. That was urgent_.” They squatted down and petted the pùca between the ears, then held their hand palm up in front of it. The pùca sniffed and expelled a not insignificant cache of hazelnuts into their hand, deflating to half its original size. Merlin blinked. Ghillie carefully separated out two hazelnuts and held them out to him. He blinked again.

“ _Put them in your ears. They take the edge off the barking._ ”

“In my ears?” Merlin hedged. “Is that…sanitary?”

Ghillie’s shoulders shook a little. “ _It’s fine. They’re basically shadows, it’s not like they have any fluids_.”

Merlin cringed at the word choice, silently resigning himself. “I guess I’ve done worse for less.”

He took the nuts and shoved them unceremoniously in his ears. Seeing as there were no dogs around, he experienced no change aside from feeling prodigiously foolish.

Ghillie laughed again and scooped up the sprites, indicating for Merlin to follow as they disappeared down the tunnel once more. Merlin did, following blindly as they crawled through an unending web of thorn tunnels and grottos, twisting and turning so that for a bare moment he lost his sense of direction. He stopped at a natural break in the bracken walls and realigned his perception with the stars.

A bark echoed in the distance.

Merlin’s heart seized, squeezing tight like a scullery maid’s fist around a cheesecloth. Still, it didn’t give out completely. He dragged in a ragged breath and looked over for Ghillie, who was frantically motioning for him to run.

“ _Quieter means closer!_ ”

Merlin hesitated. At once he conceived that he wasn’t a helpless bystander—people feared him for the power he had. He didn’t have to play the fool, or bow to indecision when he could act. He was the author of this fate.

“Don’t worry. I’m going to fix it.”

Ghillie didn’t look reassured, but they had no time to object. Merlin stood up and made a break for the tree line.

* * *

What was it that he felt?

There was a time when he was ten. One of the older boys led a handful of younger children into the woods, just to scare them. In a natural ditch where leaf litter accumulated in the shelter from the wind, rotting yellow leaves almost disguised the dull dun of picked over bones.

“Was a sorcerer. I done saw it myself, las’ year. He used the blood of little children for his sorcering, an’ they got him for it.” the boy said.

“Sorcerers die?” Will had asked.

The older boy cuffed him over the ear. “Course they die. Everything dies.”

Merlin stared. He didn’t intend to, but he looked once and didn’t look away.

Another older kid, Rowan, jumped out of the bushes on some signal and yelled. The children scattered in all directions screaming bloody murder, and the two boys ran off laughing before they could be caught and scolded. Merlin stayed.

Shuffling forward on the slick and decayed leaves, he slid down into the gulch. The skeleton became clear to him now. One arm that may have rested over the face had collapsed into the vertebrae of the neck, and within the orbit of one of the eyes a tiny bud of marsh violet hung its blue head.6 A silver clasp had fallen into the ribcage, desperately precious and still the one treasure no grave robber would dare take: a triskele, perfect in its symmetry. Three spirals, for the three faces of the triple goddess, and the three wheels of magic. Each one fed into the next in a circuit that had no end.

Merlin didn’t know the significance of this. More important was the skull, still intact despite the foraging that had carried away other smaller bones. Steeling his courage, he reached out and touched the separated jaw where two teeth were missing. He was missing the same teeth.

He thought in ways his young mind couldn’t articulate.

_What are you?_

_We are the same._

_You are like me and I am like you._

_What are you?_

_Because If I don’t know what_ you _are, then…_

_Did you hurt people?_

_Was it worth it?_

_What did you know that made it different?_

_What do I not know that makes us the same?_

Later, after dinner, he asked his mother if you could make dead people come back. After all, he could make plants come back; it wasn’t totally unrealistic. Hunith turned white as a winter sky, and told him never to ask that again.

This familiar feeling—it was not quite the same.

* * *

Merlin rested the side of his head against the trunk of a gnarled ash, peering out towards the overgrown road. There was movement in the tangle. At first he could not place it—a hulking shape heaved up and down, drawing a line of thin moonlight that ballooned and bowed with a crack. Merlin perceived it was a pair of shoulders a scant second before a gutted, desperate shout sounded under the snap of a blunt weapon on skin.

Before he could think, Merlin ran. He had become the kind of person who had instincts in place for this kind of crisis, for better or worse. The thorns tore him with a viciousness that may well have been sentient, but as quickly as he could he arrived at the scene.

A white chariot and a pair horses stood abandoned, and four white hounds were biting at their heels. Each dog had red folded over ears set on a thin, wraithlike face, with a curling whip of a tail and a svelte coat that showed the flexing of the ribcage with heavy breathing. Before them the master of the chariot stood with a cudgel in one hand high overhead, beating the master of the dogs hard into the earth ripped open by wooden wheels. The choices of face were less disturbing to Merlin than he had come to expect: the assailant appeared as King Odin of Cornwall, and the assailed as King Bayard of Mercia. The one brought down the bludgeon on the other, and he screamed in terrible pain.

“ _Hey_!” Merlin shouted.

Merlin didn’t know what he intended to do. The sound of the scream had made him speak involuntarily. The sounds of true fear and true pain are uniquely powerful in their terror, and in firing the nerves into painful awareness often mobilize the mind into unpredictable responses. He acted because it had been drilled into him that inaction would have disastrous consequences, even though he now had no follow up.

Not-Odin stopped, hand still overhead. He turned even as his victim writhed and groaned on the ground and looked down at Merlin with eyes like a fox.

“What whelp is this?” he growled. “A knave hardly worth the name—no, merely a trifle. What are you, the buzzing of a fly? My ears cannot hear such a weak thing.”

_The talkers never go down easy_ , Merlin lamented. “Leave that man alone.”

Not-Odin laughed heartily at this, turning his head to his victim. “Well then Arawn, look upon your savior. Much good he’ll do you.”

The one called Arawn rolled onto his back and spat blood on the other’s shoe. Not-Odin lifted his cudgel again, and Merlin stumbled into him, catching his wrist before he could bring it down. Incensed, the man’s chin drew into his neck and his nostrils flared, glaring into Merlin’s eyes.

“What’s your agenda, then?” he asked. They were at an impasse. Merlin was physically weaker, but when his arm began to tremble he took the second of stalemate to think through what he knew about magic. Physical strength was under the domain of Body. Body magic was far enough away from his natural bearing that it was worth counterrotating. Equidistant from his bearing in the opposite direction on the wheel of the elements would be…

Fire.

He channeled the element for all of a second before letting it snap back to its natural place, dragging Body to his center. The shaking in his hand stopped, and it became easy to hold back the other man’s hand. Merlin didn’t yet overwhelm him entirely, as that would lead to the ugly question of what to do next. He was stalling, pure and simple.

He didn’t have long to consider his options. Suddenly the man jerked forward and grunted, his eyes rolling skyward. He collapsed on the ground even as Arawn wrenched the curved dagger from his back, his ferocity rendering him more animal than man.

“If you meet your mother in hell tell her I don’t miss her.” He raised his blade again, ready to further tear the body. Merlin pushed the man away with his remaining strength, only to realize that it meant the fallen king would surely die.

Merlin pressed his hands to the sides of his head. They were shaking again. “Why did you do that?”

Arawn’s face twisted with rage. “ _King_ Gwyn wants something that isn’t his. Weren’t nothing he hasn’t done to me.”

Merlin had a feeling that the use of hasn’t and not wouldn’t wasn’t just a slip of the tongue. These two were the kind of unjustified men that appeared as kings and bandits alike with the same force of base cruelty. They had in common the same thing that the lash applied liberally to an old horse, the flinching instinct at the sight of blood, and the destruction of sacred symbols did.

Without any further ceremony Arawn took a step toward him, squaring his shoulders and extending his blade. He lunged forward, swinging his arm in a tightly controlled arc that crossed inches from Merlin’s face as he stumbled back. In the moment, he saw the white flash of the steel pass so close to his eyes that an afterimage, purple and green like bruised skin, was briefly burned into his eyes. He heard the sounds of the baying dogs as if they were far in the distance, even though he could see the gnashing of their individual teeth as they abandoned the horses to crowd his heels. The curdled dregs of wordless, shapeless fear that could never completely be scoured away corroded his ability to think clearly, reducing everything to a desperate clinging to self-preservation.

He reached for air. Shifting the wheel one notch to the left, that element came to him, mutable and vast. With a sharp bang the natural draft surrounding him contracted to the size of a marble before exploding outwards again, sending both the dogs and their master flying. Arawn’s head cracked against a tree, and it was over.

Merlin fled immediately.

Under his feet, the ruts of the chariot wheels were already being retaken by new shoots. No matter how they were torn, they would always grow back exactly the same. He tried to settle his panic, feeling it like a strange illness being inflicted on him, strangling the lungs and burning the chest, unscrewing his head from his body. It would not settle, but he could not stop.

Consequently, he narrowly avoided being trampled to death as he met a horse coming the opposite direction. Throwing himself down in the brush off the path, the only thing he saw of the rider was black hair flying back just above the shoulders.

Behind this rider came another, appearing out of the darkness with a long, wine-colored cloak snapping behind him. A flash of gold caught the scant light as it fell on his head, and the horse was pressing forward with such speed Merlin soon was able to distinguish his face.

It was Uther Pendragon.

* * *

When Hunith learned of what had happened with the wolf, she realized that for all her years of careful guarding, she could never make this world safe for her son. It was a submission that taxed her spirit greatly, which had been a long time coming. Merlin told her he hadn’t meant to do it, and she didn’t know how to explain that that was what made it such a bitter drug. Sooner or later, this had to happen—as much as they might pretend, magic could no more be separated from Merlin’s being than wood from a tree.

Heart heavy with worry, she sent him to someone who could help him the way she ultimately couldn’t. Camelot was a dangerous option, but she trusted her brother to keep Merlin safe.

One of the first things Merlin laid eyes on in Camelot was an execution.

Sorcery and enchantments was the charge. The vagueness of it left room for the idle onlookers to fill in their own image of what he had done—Merlin guessed most of them assumed murder. He could have been spelling balms for joint pains, or speeding the leavening his bread, or he might not have been a sorcerer at all. The charge of sorcery and enchantment wiped out the specificities of his life with a broad brush, dooming him to become another forgotten body.

Merlin wasn’t looking when the axe fell, fixated on the faces of the crowd. He felt like he had failed in not seeing it, but was also relieved. The crowd was easier to bear but harder to understand; he knew the moment it had happened because almost every last one of them flinched. He couldn’t make sense of this. They had come because they wanted to see, because they had the spare time and were otherwise bored of familiar work and familiar idling, and they came without any word of protest to the proceedings, but when the act itself was committed some part of them stumbled on the threshold of the horror of a life extinguished. What crucial empathetic mechanism had tried but failed to spark in their minds? Could their eyes and his eyes really be the same if they saw so differently?

Mary Collins made her pronouncement, and the pain of her words resonated with an underdeveloped corner of his thoughts. But mostly his thinking was crushed flat with the fear that this would become something even more terrible, and the desperate need to keep his head down and survive. He shoved these things down and moved on, but a thread of it was still humming under the surface, and it never stopped.

He realized it now. This familiar, acid dread was the terror of Uther’s Camelot.

* * *

Between one breath and another Merlin was standing, and caught between the urge to flee and something else, he grasped outwards on an impulse and caught hold of the corner of the cloak as it passed. He was instantly yanked off his feet, but so too was the rider from the horse, and the both of them tumbled into the dirt as the horse reared up and fled into the bushes. The stranger was attacking him before he could even get his bearings. He caught a blow across the face and heard the singing of a sword before blowing back the man with a burst of raw, neutral magic. The man stood, brushing the dirt off his front with one hand and twisting a sword to the ready with the other.

“Who the devil are you?” he spat.

Merlin found his lips were sealed shut. The man cocked his head and grinned cruelly.

“My name is Hafgan. Take it. It won’t save you.” He waited, but still Merlin did not reply. “That’s quite the reaction. This face you see, who am I?”

Like the moment the juncture of the stem of an apple gives way and lets the fruit fall, from one second to another Merlin simply ran out of the capacity to be afraid. There was too much of the fear to bear; it had to become something else.

“You ruined my life,” Merlin finally said. For if it weren’t for Uther’s damnable witch-hunts and unjust laws, if it weren’t for poisonous taint of the miscarriage of power instated to serve Uther’s own profligate grudge, itself a rotten mutation of pain an hatred that had lost all reason, what might life have been like? Looking backwards, there was a possibility of a reality where magic was simply a gift and not a shackle, where he had never learned the shape of human bones expect in books. And then, maybe not. Uther had certainly not originated the fear of magic, just as it hadn’t stayed within the borders of Camelot. In the moment, it ceased to matter—Uther’s likeness became the flag of a long and silent wartime. 

“That’s a wonderful face you’re making,” Hafgan said. “I see there may be some fire in you.”

Merlin laughed deliriously. “Getting fire in me is the one thing I’ve managed to avoid, actually.”

Hafgan didn’t bother to reply. He drove forward and struck out with his sword, much in the same way Uther might have. Merlin pushed back with magic on reflex, but Hafgan was prepared now, and when he braced himself against it he retained his footing. He thrust the blade forward and Merlin barely stumbled out of its path.

“What?” Hafgan cackled, “So tepid? So afraid of a cut? Your life must have been easy to ruin.”

Unthinkingly, Merlin lashed out with the vines that strangled their ankles, each grasping and biting into leather and skin where they struck. Hafgan didn’t so much as flinch, smiling wider now.

“You’re not him,” Merlin said. Something wild was fighting to escape his skin, and he tried desperately to hold it back.

“What difference does it make? Striking at false images is still better than living like a worm. I promise my own deeds are heavy enough to measure up. Even if I’m not him I am more him than you are, or else you’re more him than I am—”

Merlin stopped trying.

The vines wove themselves upwards, braiding around Hafgan’s limbs even as he hacked at them with all of his might. The king seemed to relish in the desperation and ferocity of his own carving, and his lips curled back from his teeth in a way that no longer signified anything. Thorns bit into his wrists and ankles and pulled them like the usurper Procopius at the moment preceding execution.7 His sword clattered down upon the earth, but even then he laughed.

“Good man! Fill yourself with rage. Choke on it. Slake your grudge as long as you like, for with every strike after the first you only redouble my life.”

“Okay,” Merlin replied flatly. “Then I won’t strike you.”

He channeled Light and let it snap back. The magic that came in its place was almost alien to him, so rarely did he call on it. It made his blood burn like strong wine. He reached out a hand and the magic of Pain descended on Hafgan like a pestilence.

Pain, as a magic, is the juncture between Death and Body. It is associated impartially with diseased and fevered blood, multicolored transformations of bruised skin, splinters of bone, steel and leather instruments made for an awful purpose. However, Hafgan’s skin did not split, nor did it fester with sores. He did not choke on blood, or bend back his limbs, or in any way come apart bodily. He simply turned purple and screamed, and the hearing it was probably worse.

The sound stirred the embers of fear from Merlin’s dispassion, and as he felt the blood pounding in every inch of his body he lost his nerve and stopped. Only, as soon as he did Hafgan sprung up again, ripping his limbs from the thorns without flinching, even as they shredded his skin. He reached for the sword, and so Merlin did to. Merlin squeezed the grip in his hand, pulling the blade in front of him, and in his haste Hafgan ran himself upon the sword. The king fell down and pulled the weapon with him.

For a moment the only sound was the rustling of cloth from his own quaking hands, but just as quickly the rumbling of hooves came again as sure as the turning of the hour. The last of the four kings, the one who appeared to him in the likeness of Cenred, rounded the bend.

“Hafgan!” The last king shouted in advance of himself. “Half-formed bastard, have you given up entirely?”

He stopped abruptly at the sight of Merlin and the corpse, drawing up the reins so sharply that the horse attempted to buck him off. Merlin felt his body falling back into a violent shape with the kind of animal sureness one has before falling or vomiting. Seeing this, the man attempted to head disaster off at the pass.

“Woah there! I have no quarrel with you,” he said.

Merlin sneered. “Aren’t you the King of Avalon? Isn’t that what the King of Avalon does?”

“My title is purely honorary. I’m just following form.”

“The others are dead,” Merlin said. “You could be the king if you wanted.”

The man laughed. “Stranger, Avalon doesn’t have a king. It has a chief, who prefers if all the uppish warlords are too busy chasing each other to threaten herself.”

Merlin blinked, his thoughts coming sluggish as cold honey. “Arianrhod.”

“The very same.”

There was a rustle in the bushes. Merlin turned quickly and at first could separate nothing from the weavings of the dense undergrowth, but at a second glance he saw familiar broad shoulders decked in greenery. Ghillie stood still as a stone, looking back at him.

Merlin’s eyes flitted to Hafgan’s body, and un-Cenred beside him. He wondered what Ghillie had seen. He had an insane urge to wave his arms and shout _it’s okay! I fixed it!_ There were, after all, no more tyrants to warmonger. There was no one left to run from. He took half a step forward and Ghillie disappeared into the wood.

Merlin stared after them. Without any real reason, he knew what Ghillie felt just then. He knew that uncanny, familiar terror very well.

Scarcely aware of himself, he made half a polite excuse to the horseman before wandering in the direction Taliesin had originally pointed out, now burdened with the knowledge that there was nothing stopping him from carrying on. He arrived at a cavemouth in a daze, half thinking that the man had not lied, and that the path there had been straight and short. Taliesin was waiting in the shelter of the stone wall, listening to the wind whistle across the natural round in the island’s structure. He waved sedately as Merlin approached, as though nothing strange had happened and they were just casually happening across each other.

Of all things, it was seeing Will’s face that broke the spell. Feeling returned to him like a slap to the face, rushing over him like the returning tide and soothing his nerves by re-devastating them. His tears spilled over, and his face burned. He cried like a child and reflected that he had always been called a crybaby and a coward, all his life. All at once that seemed like a fine thing to be.

Taliesin hovered near him, obviously hesitant to lay a hand on him but equally uncomfortable with just standing there. “What happened?”

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Merlin sobbed. He didn’t want to fight. He didn’t want to be feared anymore, or even respected for his power. Why should he be born to win a war? Who had the audacity to make such a design? Why should he be born during wartime at all?

“You can go home,” Taliesin said uneasily. The admission seemed to take a good deal of effort.

Merlin didn’t bother to wipe his tears, looking the poet full in the face. It seemed they had made a fundamental miscommunication. “Taliesin, I _am_ going home _._ ”

Glimpsing the edge of something enormous, Taliesin could only dumbly stand aside.

* * *

Notes

1. The Ghillie Dhu, the namesake of the ghillie suit, is a reclusive Scottish fairy who wears leaves and moss and is kind to children.

2. Latin again. “Who are you?”

3. This is actually kind of a mish mash of cŵn annwn, the Welsh tradition hounds of Avalon, and the cù-sìth/cú-sídhe, the Scottish/Irish cow-sized dog fairy. Both are death portents, but the cù-sìth is the one who barks three times and you die, and the cŵn annwn is the one that’s pale with red ears, whose barks get quieter as they come closer.

4. In the Mabinogi, Arawn and Hafgan are rival kings of Annwn, and the hero Pwyll is enlisted by Arawn to fight for him. Pwyll succeeds by only striking Hafgan once, and is awarded the title ‘head of Annwn’ as well. The fourth king refers to welsh psychopomp Gwyn ap Nudd, who somewhere along the way became the ruler of Annwn in later tradition. Their bloodlust here is totally unrelated to their actual mythological canon.

5. Cat-sìth is a celtic, but mostly Scottish fairy, described as a black cat the size of a dog, with a white blaze. They are best known for stealing souls.

6. Hanakotoba of the day: blue violet signifies vigilance and love. As a side note, in Celtic tradition ash trees ward off fairies, and anyone who felled one could expect their house to burn down.

7. Procopius lived in the mid 4th century and attempted to usurp the roman emperor Valens. He was executed using trees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Build you own joke about Merlin and the king’s wood here  
> Bust out the confetti because we’re halfway through this cursed island!!! Four terraces to go and none of them are the kind of nonstop misery train this one is. And Arthur’s still got that hazelnut huh 👀  
> Lyric Highlight, NFWMB – “If I was born as a blackthorn tree/ I’d want to be felled by you/ Held by you/ Fuel the pyre of your enemies”


End file.
